New Updates to the Marin Nicasio 1!

• Posted on 21 March 2025
• By Shreddy
• 0

A step through drop bar bike?!?

The Marin Nicasio 1 has always been a perpetual fan favourite and staff favourite. If you come in wanting to know about the best all-rounder just for getting started in your riding journey, it’s going to be the bike we guide you to. For 2025, Marin has updated not just the paint colours, but a lot of structural updates too! We’ve always described the Nicasio 1 as a bike that can grow with you. It’s a perfectly capable and dependable bike to just get started on, but as you start to do more riding, and different types of riding, it’s very accommodating in the ways you can change it. You can update the pedals to try clipless riding, you can add tons of accessories onto the mounts, you can change out the tires as you try tackling new terrain, and there are mounting points for racks and fenders as you try carrying different things on the bike and going through different weather conditions. These things are of course still true on the 2025 Nicasio 1, but with even more capacity to do more, grow with you, and take you farther into your riding journey.

First off, with the less extreme structural changes, they’ve given you tons of mounting points, with even more spots to put stuff on the smaller frames. You’ve got spots for 4 water bottles on a size 50 frame, which is quite generous, and going from 2 mounting points on the fork to 3, so you have more cargo carrying options. They also have still got spots for front and rear racks and fenders. The fork also has one of the biggest changes to the bike – the updated tire clearance. The older Nicasio 1 models were able to accommodate a tire clearance of 35, which is quite nice, but still pretty limited. The 2025 Nicasio 1 model has resolved this by giving us clearance for 45! This is a huge improvement in the spacing, and leaves you room to add fenders and still run some pretty chunky tires. This is another way it’s continuing in the line of thinking of being able to do whatever you want to do with it.

Another very major and obvious change is the introduction of a step through frame variant. This is a smart move from Marin, taking cues from the popularity of the other step through offerings in their lineup and bringing it to one of their most popular bikes. There are tons of reasons someone might want to ride a step through style frame, outside of aesthetics. The utility of not having to swing your leg over the back of the bike, so as not to disturb any rear cargo or a child seat, while also not having to swing your leg over the top tube on a step over frame shape, meaning you can keep the bike more steady and stable, not have to lean it over, not to mention accommodations for folks with mobility challenges. It makes tons of sense to bring the step through to a bike that folks already do all kinds of things with, and let them do even more!

Another major change is the sizing. One of the things that made the Nicasio 1 so great for folks who are just starting their cycling journey is that they came in a huge size range – from 47 to 60! There have been some adjustments made to the size offerings for 2025, so while this is still true across the model family, it’s no longer the case with just the step over frame shape. The size run has been split across the two variants, with the Nicasio 1 ST taking on sizes 47 - 58 and the Nicasio 1 coming in sizes 50 - 60. It’s still a really generous size range for both bikes, but by making the step through available in the smallest size, it means smaller riders who might encounter difficulties with the standover height are still able to ride a bike that’s appropriately sized for them.

It might seem on the surface that there haven’t been a ton of changes, but there have! The 2025 Marin Nicasio 1 is continually being improved upon and has been updated to address a ton of the thoughts and considerations that folks had presented Marin with. These updates are very exciting, and we’re hoping to see more folks coming in this season to check it out! 

We’ve put together an in-depth review of the bike and an explanation that gets into more detail than this blog post over on our YouTube channel, so if you’d like to check that out, I’ve got it linked below.

Happy trails!