Based in the Basque country where you’re never more than spitting distance from a mountain, Orbea is an obvious pick when talking about lightweight climber’s bikes.
The one-time arms manufacturer has been making bikes for the better part of a century, and its Orca is a pure racer that’s campaigned by French Pro Continental team Cofidis. On test we have the second-tier frameset, which gets Orbea’s slightly lower-grade OMP carbon rather than the top-spec OMR stuff. Nevertheless, the frame is claimed to be 180g lighter than its predecessor at around 1,050g, as well as offering the usual cocktail of improved stiffness and compliance.
The Orca’s frame looks like it was sculpted by somebody with an imagination rather than mere CAD skills. Its lines are complex and varied, with the paint job and the two-tone bar tape playing pleasing counterpoint to one another.
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Where the colour scheme has the top-tube flowing cleanly into the seatstays, the transition in the actual tube shapes is more angular and abrupt, and it’s mirrored by the suggestion of a kink at the other end where it meets the head-tube.
There’s a similar sense of symmetry between the fork legs and the seatstays, both of which flare outwards a few inches above the dropouts, and if you look on the insides of the fork and the stays, you’ll notice a cool geometric pattern. Just to be different (or more likely because it’s torsionally stiffer), the down-tube sports a cross-section that’s approximately diamond-shaped.
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