Race Face just built an entire component group around one argument: that your downcountry bike is carrying weight it doesn’t need to. The Era SL Crankset is the headline — 422 grams with a 32-tooth ring, which Race Face is calling the lightest production XC crank you can buy — but it doesn’t show up alone. A matching carbon wheelset and a flippable carbon handlebar landed with it, all three parts aimed at the same 120-140mm-travel category that’s been eating the pure XC race bike alive all year. We’ve covered handlebars, wheels, forks, and drivetrains on this site more times than I can count. This is the first time a brand’s put out a full downcountry group in one shot, with hard numbers on all three parts. Worth a close look, and worth being honest about the price tag.

Quick Take

Crankset weight	422g (170mm, with 32T ring)
Crankset price	$576.99 USD / $649.99 CAD
Crank lengths	160, 165, 170, 175mm
Crank warranty	Lifetime, crash damage included
Wheelset rim weight	385g (claimed lightest carbon MTB rim to date)
Wheelset complete weight	1,530g (6-bolt, tape/valves not included)
Wheelset price	$1,649.98 USD / €1,748 / $2,198 CAD
Wheel size	29in only
Category	Downcountry / short-travel trail, up to 140mm
Best for:	Weight-obsessed riders on 120-140mm bikes who don’t blink at flagship pricing
Skip if:	You want XC-crank weight without XC-crank money

A Full Downcountry Group, Not Just a Crank

Race Face didn’t quietly refresh one part. The Era SL name now covers a crankset, a wheelset, and a handlebar, and every one of them ships with a “lightest in class” claim attached. That’s a coordinated launch, not a spec bump on an existing product line. And the category they’re all aimed at is specific: not XC race bikes with 100mm of travel and a lockout lever glued to the bar, but the 120-140mm downcountry class that bikes like the Santa Cruz Blur Mk5 have been redefining all year. Race Face is reading the same trend everyone else in this market is reading — riders want one bike that climbs like an XC rig and doesn’t fall apart the first time the trail points down — and building parts to match it.

The Crankset: 422 Grams, Steel Wear Plate, Lifetime Warranty

Here’s the number that’s doing all the marketing work: 422g for a 170mm crank with a 32T ring mounted. That’s a genuinely light crank. Race Face gets there with a carbon body, an integrated aluminum spindle (30mm diameter, 7000-series alloy) that removes a chunk of the hardware a traditional two-piece crank needs, and a stainless steel wear plate where your shoe actually contacts the crank arm — the part that would otherwise be the first thing to chew through on a featherweight carbon layup.

The specs, for anyone speccing a build:

• Lengths: 160, 165, 170, and 175mm — shorter options than most XC cranks bother offering, which matters if you’ve been fighting pedal strikes on a 175mm arm.
• Chainline: two configurations, 52mm with a DM ring or 55mm with a DMW ring, and a Q-factor of 170mm.
• Price: $576.99 USD, $649.99 CAD. Chainrings and bottom brackets sold separately, so budget beyond the headline number.
• Colors: Black, Kashmoney, and Stealth.
• Warranty: lifetime, crash damage included. That’s the detail that separates this from a pure weight-weenie part built to be babied. Race Face is betting the carbon body and steel wear plate hold up to being actually ridden, not just weighed.

For context on what that price buys: a complete Shimano XTR M9200 Di2 drivetrain — derailleur, shifter, cassette, chain, and cranks — runs around $1,800. The Era SL crank alone is a third of that, for one part. It’s not an unreasonable price for a flagship carbon crank. It’s just a price that assumes you’ve already decided grams matter more than dollars.

The Wheelset: 385-Gram Rims, 1,530 Grams Complete

The Era SL Wheelset is the quieter half of the launch, and arguably the more impressive engineering claim. A 385g rim is what Race Face is calling its lightest carbon rim to date, and the complete wheelset — 6-bolt rotor mount, no tape or valves included — comes in at 1,530g. That’s XC race wheel territory on a wheelset built for a category that’s supposed to also survive real descending.

The build makes that dual purpose believable rather than just marketing copy. Rims run 22mm depth and 29mm internal width, wide enough for tires up to 2.6” without the rim doing anything weird to the tire’s profile. Hubs are Race Face’s own Vault, with 3° of engagement, oversized bearings, and tool-free serviceability — a proven hub, not a new unknown paired with an unproven rim. Spoke count is 28 front and rear. Freehub options cover Microspline, XD, and HG, so driver compatibility isn’t the reason to skip these. Race Face also claims 8.6% more lateral compliance than its own Era wheels (the enduro-rated version), which is the number they’re using to argue this rim flexes enough to be comfortable without folding under a hard cornering load.

The catch is the same catch as the crank: 29in only, rated for trail use up to 140mm travel with a 130kg system weight limit. This isn’t an enduro wheel wearing a lighter badge. It’s built to the downcountry brief and nothing past it.

Price is where the wheelset gets hard to defend on value alone: $1,649.98 USD, €1,748, $2,198 CAD. For a useful comparison, Reynolds’ new A275 alloy XC wheelset weighs 1,520g a pair — 10 grams lighter than the Era SL’s complete carbon build — for $449. Both wheelsets carry a lifetime rim warranty. The Era SL is carbon and the Reynolds is alloy, and carbon buys you ride-feel differences an alloy rim can’t match — more precise tracking, less high-frequency buzz through the bar. But if the number you care about is grams-per-dollar, the alloy wheel wins by a landslide, and it’s not close.

The Handlebar: A Flippable Bar That Weighs Almost Nothing

The third piece is a carbon handlebar that claims 170g — light enough that it undercuts most of the carbon bars we tested for our handlebar guide this year. It ships at 760mm width with a 35mm clamp, 8° of backsweep and 5° of upsweep, and the standout feature: it flips to give either +6mm or -6mm of rise from the same bar, depending which way you clock it in the stem. One bar, two rise options, no second purchase if your position preference changes.

Minimum safe width after trimming is 720mm — narrower than that and Race Face won’t stand behind the bar’s stiffness. It’s also not compatible with direct-mount stems, so check your cockpit before ordering. At $198.99, it’s priced in line with what a flagship carbon bar costs elsewhere; it’s the crank and wheelset carrying the “steepest price” half of this story, not the bar.

What Is a Downcountry Component Group?

A downcountry component group is a set of parts — typically a crank, wheelset, and handlebar — engineered to XC-race weight targets while being rated for the geometry and impact loads of a 120-140mm-travel bike rather than a dedicated 100mm XC race rig. The goal is XC-bike climbing weight without swapping parts before a descent-heavy ride.

The Price Problem

None of these three parts is expensive because Race Face padded the margin for no reason. Carbon layups this light, with a lifetime warranty that includes crash damage, cost real money to engineer and back. But “justified” and “accessible” aren’t the same thing, and this launch sits firmly on the justified-but-not-accessible side of that line. We saw the same pattern from a different angle in Intend’s new Elevator dropper post — genuine engineering, priced like it, aimed at riders who’ve already decided budget isn’t the deciding factor. The Era SL family is that same story with lower weight instead of new damping tech as the pitch.

Who Should Actually Buy This

Riders on a 120-140mm downcountry bike who are already shopping flagship parts. If your build already has a top-tier fork and a wireless drivetrain, the Era SL group is a consistent step, not an outlier. It matches the spend-to-weight-savings ratio you’ve already committed to elsewhere on the bike.

Anyone chasing every gram on a race-day build. The crank and wheelset combined shave real weight off a short-travel bike without giving up the 6-bolt rotor mounts and tire clearance that make a bike rideable on non-race days too. That’s the actual pitch of “downcountry,” and Race Face built to it rather than to a pure XC weight target.

Riders who’ve been burned by rim warranties before. Race Face’s lifetime crash warranty on the crank, paired with a rim built specifically to flex rather than crack under lateral load, is aimed at exactly the rider who’s cracked a lightweight carbon part on a rock strike and sworn off ultralight carbon since.

Who Should Skip It

Anyone cross-shopping on weight-per-dollar. The Reynolds A275 comparison above isn’t close. If your priority is the lightest wheel you can afford rather than the lightest wheel period, alloy options get you 90% of the weight savings for a quarter of the price.

Riders on a dedicated enduro or trail bike over 140mm. These parts aren’t rated for that use case, full stop. The 130kg system weight limit on the wheelset and the downcountry-specific engineering across the group mean this isn’t a lighter alternative to your Era (non-SL) or enduro-rated parts — it’s a narrower one.

Anyone who hasn’t decided if they’re racing or just riding. If you’re not sure your next bike purchase is a dedicated downcountry build, this is an expensive way to find out. Buy the bike and the riding style first. The parts can follow.

The Bottom Line

Race Face backed up its lightest-in-class claims with real numbers across three parts at once, and the engineering behind the claims looks sound — a steel wear plate where the crank actually wears, a hub already proven in the field, a bar that solves the rise question without needing a second purchase. That’s a legitimately good downcountry component group. It’s also priced at the very top of what this market will bear, and unlike a lot of “lightest ever” launches, the price gap to a comparably capable alternative (see: Reynolds’ alloy wheels at a quarter of the cost for nearly identical weight) isn’t small. If you’ve already committed to a flagship downcountry build, this is a clean way to finish it. If you’re weighing grams against dollars, there are cheaper ways to get most of the way there.

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Specs and pricing sourced from Race Face’s official Era SL Crankset and Era SL Wheels product pages, plus launch coverage from Pinkbike, Bikerumor, Bikepacking.com, and Singletracks. No test units have been ridden by our team at time of publication.