Industry Interviews – Getting to Know the Salsa Cutthroat with Salsa Cycles’ Adam Macbeth

Here at Off Course Bike Shop, we’ve always had a special soft spot for Salsa Cycles. They’ve been one of the mainstays of our range since before I can remember, and members of our team have ridden them in all kinds of amazing places.

If there’s one thing that jumps out to me about Salsa, it is their willingness to embrace strange innovations, years before many others in the industry. This often results in bikes full of quirks, and while I have yet to see any of these quirks not be vindicated by broader industry shifts, they sometimes require a bit of explanation. 

This week, I caught up with Salsa Cycles Australia brand manager, Adam Macbeth, to peel back the layers on one of Salsa’s rowdiest and most exciting rigs: the Salsa Cutthroat. 

You’re right, it is very unique and surprisingly has continued to be so in a market literally overflowing with ‘adventure’ bikes. The reason for the Cutthroat’s existence can be summed up in two words – Tour Divide. For those unfamiliar, Tour Divide is an offroad race (you can also tour the route) from Canada to Mexico that requires riders to be fully unsupported for weeks, on a huge variety of surfaces from tarmac to singletrack, gravel roads and forgotten passes. 

When Salsa released the Fargo in 2009 it was groundbreaking – a drop bar, 29er mountain bike designed specifically for bikepacking and loaded touring. 2009 was also the year of the second ever Tour Divide race and it very quickly became the most popular choice for riders and racers alike looking to tackle what’s still considered the world’s premiere bikepacking route.

A lot of these riders started dreaming of a much lighter, faster Fargo though, and while the Fargo Titanium initially filled this space, the release of the Cutthroat in 2015 answered a lot of prayers. Not only was that initial Cutthroat wildly lighter than both the steel and titanium Fargos, it also featured a lot of engineered ride comfort and a 20% larger framebag space for each size. It was lighter, smoother, and more capable of carrying refined loads. Cutthroat changed the game for drop bar bikepacking bikes and to this day remains very hard to go past if you’re planning adventures.    

How much lighter are we actually talking?

You’re asking the right guy! For reference, I’ve owned a couple of different iterations of the steel Fargo, a Fargo Titanium and both generations of Cutthroat. My original 2009 steel Fargo was 14kg. I didn’t care, it was ridiculously fun riding 29×2.4 rubber on drop bars. My titanium Salsa Fargo was 11.5kg and noticeably much more efficient that the steel bike. My most recent Cutthroat was the standard Force AXS bike, to which I then added a SON dynamo hub and full K-Lite lighting and charging. Even with these additions, that bike was 9.3kg.

A couple of kilos doesn’t sound like a lot, but as a percentage-decrease, it’s a huge difference. A 58cm complete bike in the GRX 1x spec (our most popular) comes in at 10.9kg out of the box, with the top end or custom built options coming in much lighter. With good outdoor gear, it’s actually not difficult to have your Cutthroat and all your gear for bikepacking (excluding food and water) come in under 15kg.

You describe the Cutthroat as a drop-bar mountain bike, putting it in the same family as the Salsa Fargo. Is it too dirt-oriented for fast days on the tarmac, or can it handle that too?

No, the Cutthroat really is a fantastic bike on all surfaces. If you were planning for a trip or an event that was going to predominantly be tarmac you’d want to change gearing slightly (for example, I usually run a 36t chainring on my Cutthroat but would change to a 40t for predominantly tarmac) as well as running some faster rubber. I’ve seen people set up the Cutthroat as a dedicated smooth-gravel bike with a 40t chainring and some 40mm gravel tyres and those bikes were fast!

That said, my usual Cutthroat setup with a tyre like the Vittoria Mezcal in 2.35 is crazy fast on all surfaces and that pure mixed-terrain vibe is Cutthroat’s true strength. 

The Cutthroat is obviously designed for some rugged, long-term use, what would you say to riders that have durability concerns around using a carbon bike as their dedicated bikepacking bike?

I think a lot of the carbon-concern comes from the early days of carbon fibre, especially of road bikes being prone to failure from some pretty minor mishaps. We now live in an age where most World Cup downhill and enduro race bikes are carbon and those things can survive all kinds of mayhem, including rock strike.

Cutthroat’s design focus is certainly durability – to be able to take on some of the world’s toughest routes and get you to the end. It came out light simply because it is carbon, not because they whittled it right down to be as light as they could possibly make it. Depending on size, Cutthroat frames are around the 1500g mark, which is about double what a high end carbon road frame weighs these days and a little heavier than many high end cross-country hardtail mountain bikes.

I’d be using some protective tape in any areas likely to have straps from bags on them. I didn’t do this on my own bike and the paint was just fine, but it’s better to be cautious. I would not clamp anything to any of the tubes – so seat-stay mounted capsule racks are definitely out. There are some rules I’d also follow around rack use, but I have a feeling you’re about to ask me that….

You read my mind! Firstly, can you take us through all the mounting options for gear on a Cutthroat?

Sure. All sizes in Cutthroat offer mounts on the fork for cargo cages, and for a lowrider, panniers-only front rack. There is no provision for a crown-mounted deck style rack. 

All sizes also offer top tube bag direct-mount, mounts for a direct-mount, strap-free frame-bag as well as mounts on the dropout for a rear rack, although you will need to run a seatpost collar that features rack mounts as the upper seatstays of the Cutthroat do not allow for mounts. Under the downtube there is also a water bottle mount and a second mount to attach a spares or first aid kit. If you don’t plan on using a frame bag, sizes 56cm and above allow for three full sized water bottles inside the front triangle, and sizes 54cm and below just offer you the two. As I mentioned above, the front triangle space on a Cutthroat is huge relative to the bike (around 20-25% more space than an equivalent size Fargo) and you can fit a lot in there, even on the small sizes. The frame and fork also feature internal routing for dynamo cables keeping them out of harm’s way.  

That’s a lot of choice! A lot of our community will be stoked to hear that a combination of racks and bags is possible. Can you take us through any issues you see using a rack on a Cutthroat.

I guess my first one has to do with ride comfort. The Cutthroat (along with all Salsa’s other carbon dropbar bikes) features the Cat 5 VRS system in the rear end which I’m sure you’re going to ask me about. If you ride next to someone on a Salsa on a rough road you can literally see the rear end absorbing bumps. In my mind, using a rack on a Cutthroat is likely to brace the rear end a bit and not allow it to absorb vibration as well as it could. I’m definitely riffing here, as I haven’t heard this feedback from our team or customers, but that would be my main drawback to rack use. The second thing you’d want to do is make sure you’re fitting your rack with a torque wrench and keeping it snug. If you accidentally use a rack loose on a steel bike and destroy a rack thread you can pretty easily re-thread it but this is not the Cutthroat’s story. Fit your rack properly, keep it snug and maybe avoid taking it on and off all the time and it’ll be fine. There are a number of racks these days that mount from the axle (with a replacement thru-axle) and I feel super good about these for Cutthroat use.

Okay, let’s really get into it: can you explain for us the Class 5 VRS system that the Cutthroat and some other Salsa models feature?

Dirt roads in the USA use a rating system so you can look on a map and determine how rough they are going to be. I wish we had that here! Cat 5 is the roughest. Think completely corrugated, blown out rarely used gravel backroads. Think high country tracks that resemble a minefield of tussock grass. The Cat 5 Vibration Reduction System is fancy marketing speak for ‘we designed this thing to eat rough roads for breakfast.’ Salsa’s Cutthroat, along with the Warroad, Warbird and the aluminium Stormchaser all feature this technology in the rear of the bike. Essentially there is a flattened section on the chainstay that is engineered to flex. The seatstays, that lead up to where you sit, feature a wide, curved profile that flexes and absorbs vibration before it gets anywhere near you. Sounds like a made up thing, right? But hey, it works! I certainly find I can stay seated and keep pedalling my Cutthroat on surfaces where I need to stand up and coast on other bikes, and I’m definitely way fresher four or five days into a multi-day ride on the Cutthroat than I have ever been on another bike.

It says Mountain Bike on the label, so what if I want to set it up for maximum gnarl… flat bars? Can it take a suspension fork?

Absolutely and the Cutthroat rides great like this. One of our ambassadors, Kia Binch, has her personal Cutthroat set up with a 100mm Rockshox fork, a dropper post and flat handlebars and wow this thing is a little rocketship! I’ve seen people comment ‘why wouldn’t you just buy a mountain bike?’ but it’s important to remember all the stuff discussed above about ride comfort and mounting options as the majority of (maybe all?) carbon mountain bikes are designed for efficiency and speed rather than shock damping and forgiveness, and they will ride substantially harsher than a Cutthroat.

Is there anything else about the Cutthroat you think we should know?

As someone very into fly fishing I love that the Cutthroat is named after the native trout that is abundant in the mountain streams all along the Tour Divide route. In all seriousness though, my advice is to ride this bike. I’ve seen so many people (including some hardcore steel-bike-only colleagues) absolutely lose their minds over how fast, comfortable and capable the Cutthroat is. It’s an extremely rewarding riding experience that will definitely enhance your ability and desire to challenge yourself with some multi-day bicycle adventure.

Thanks for your support, Off Course.

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It’s always a pleasure to catch up with an old friend like Adam and pick his brain on these matters. If you’d like to chat about the Cutthroat or arrange a test-ride, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us here at the shop or shoot us an email at info@offcourse.bike.

As always, wishing you strong tailwinds and happy trails.

Finn.
Off Course