WTB Silverado v2 Saddle: At The Finish

WTB Silverado v2 Saddle: At The Finish – by Guitar Ted

NOTE: WTB sent over a Silverado titanium railed saddle at no charge for test and review. I was not paid, nor bribed for this review and I always strive to give my honest thoughts and views throughout. 

It is time to wrap up this WTB Silverado saddle review so let’s get to it! If you missed the mid-term update, you can find that HERE with a link there to the introduction. In that update I mentioned that the only real question I had left was whether or not this new version of the Silverado was any better than the old one. I thought that perhaps the new one might be “as good” as the old one, but I wasn’t ready to call it “better”.

So many times it has been seen that a nice product – typically a contact point product – is changed, or worse yet, discontinued, so that what was deemed pretty darn near to perfection by many riders was now no longer an option. Sometimes that is due to failing sales. Sometimes it is chalked up to “progress”. Sometimes it is a mystery.

In the case of the Silverado, a wildly popular saddle with many riders, the motivation was an evolutionary one. WTB wanted to make the saddle better than the old one without missing what was good about the old Silverado. A tough nut to crack there, I might add. Now comes the question, “Did WTB manage to pull this off?”

Lately I’ve been riding an old, original Silverado with an embroidered Salsa “Pepperman” logo on it. I’ve backed up those rides with this new Silverado v2. Sometimes I look at the new one and wonder if it is, in fact, one of the older versions I have. (The more recent Silverado saddles, before the new version, look very similar to the V2 saddle.) The feelings are very similar.

So, I pulled out a tape measure. My old saddle is the 133mm wide version. That was all they made back then. It is 285mm in length, according to my tape measure. The new one is a 142mm wide one with a length of 266mm using the same tape measure. Furthermore, the old one has a bit more pronounced dip, or as I like to say, a “bucket” to it. The new one still has that, it just isn’t as pronounced.

Okay? So what? Well, I do like that Silverado saddles come in this wider width, because it is a bit more friendly to my posterior, but am I missing that pronounced “bucket” or the missing 19mm of length?

Nope!

So, for me the new Silverado is better. Mostly because of the width factor. That said, WTB didn’t really do much here except offer that new padding/base to the design and they lopped of a whopping 19mm of length. In the world of “short nosed/wide rear end” saddles, the new Silverado isn’t really anything to write home about. But…..WTB didn’t screw up a classic either. If that matters to you, you can probably count on liking the newer Silverado just fine. if you are looking for that new-fangled blunt-nosed, broad back-ended saddle, I’d suggest looking at the Gravelier, WTB’s other offering in this vein. That one is about 245mm long, again, using my tape measure to measure the one I have on hand.

At The Finish: So, to answer the question, I would say that the answer is “No”. The new one isn’t better than the old one, it is just a hair different. Is that a “bad thing”? I don’t think so, especially if you are of the mind that the original was a great saddle. You’ll likely get on with the V2 if you need another Silverado.

I don’t think the new Silverado does that “short-nosed-broad back-end” saddle thing though either. No- that’s the Graveleir. This isn’t really going to give you that sort of experience, in my opinion. The new Silverado is an evolutionary change and it feels a lot like the old one does, but maybe it has a better base/padding combination, if anything. Again, I don’t think that is a negative with the Silverado at all.

The Silverado died. Long live the Silverado! Get the new one if you liked the old one or think you may have liked the old one, but never tried one. See WTB’s Silverado page here for more information.