WELCOME TO PINKBIKE 2022
DOWNCOUNTRY FIELD TEST
6 new short stroke bikes
Words by Mike Levy, photography by Tom Richards
The latest round of field testing saw the crew ride enduro bikes in Bellingham, Washington, but things are a lot more French this time around, and there’s a lot less suspension to save our butts. . That’s because we packed up our gear and flew to Quebec, Canada with six of the most interesting (and available) short-travel bikes to see how they stack up and perform away from our usual trails. There are a few different names for this category, some of them sillier and more invented than others, but the essence is 125mm or less in the rear and the focus is on fast ground coverage. . Call the bikes whatever you want, but I think we’ll just call them fun.
There was a time when all full suspension mountain bikes were short travel mountain bikes, but then they started to specialize more and more, people started categorizing and, well, here we are. In this series of field tests, most of our test bikes are designed to pedal well, cover terrain quickly and not weigh a lot, but it’s always more interesting when you include a few outliers. That’s why we brought the aluminum Wildcat V3 from RSD to Quebec City, which retails for US$3,999, and the very black Follow from Evil, both of which sit on the more rugged end of the short-travel spectrum.
The other four bikes in this group include Ibis’ Exie and Allied’s BC40, both made in the USA and priced to reflect that. BMC’s gorgeous green Fourstroke LT One is also there and it was almost a shame to get it muddy, and Lapierre sent us his new XRM, a cross-county racer with an all-day marathon-type mindset.
How do we choose the bikes?
The first step in figuring out which bikes we want to have in a field test is to make sure we won’t get the one you want to play, which has proven surprisingly easy to do for every test on the land never organized. . All kidding aside, the factors that go into choosing bikes are pretty simple. First, they must be new or at least interesting, and second, they must be somewhat available for purchase by someone somewhere in the world. As you can imagine, this has been a tough box to check for the past two years, but availability is improving.
Another consideration: we always want bikes that do things differently from each other, even if they have similar intentions. Sure, there’s an argument to be made for having the exact same type of bikes going against each other, but do you know what that would be? Boring.
Instead, we wanted two bikes focused on efficiency and speed, torque that would be perfect for your sketchy jumps and – here’s a crazy idea – how about one or two that cost no more than 10 000 USD? Yes, some of these bikes are very expensive, but that’s why we also run our Value Bike field tests every year; if you want good value for your money, this is the field test for you. And that’s also why we’ve got RSD’s $3,999 Wildcat in this round, so we can talk about what spending twice the money does—and doesn’t do—for you on the trail.
There’s really only one way to properly examine a bike: get off it. But when it comes to field testing, we need to ride them all back-to-back so we can talk about how the bikes compare to each other. After all, that’s what these field tests are for, comparisons and discussions about each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and what kind of rider and terrain each bike is best suited for.
This means that if you ran into us on the trail, you might find us swapping pedals, running shock pumps and doing other things while we rotate the bikes between us during countless walks in Quebec. And while that means we can’t comment much on long-term durability, it does give us plenty of impressions and disagreements to debate on camera. We’ve done great laps, but most of our time requires more compact and concise test loops that allow for those consecutive impressions that are so important.
Equally important is the terrain we rode the bikes on; as much as I love skidding a sketchy line on a short-travel bike, we have to ride them the way they’re meant to be ridden. In the case of our six short-travel bikes, that meant plenty of rolling trails full of roots and rocks, but nothing more than one of these bikes should be able to brush easily.
VBN ATV Trails Shannahan Sector
Most of our test rides have been in the forests around the legendary ski resort of Mont-Sainte-Anne, where you’ll find everything from slick berms to as many roots and rocks as you want, then well others. We also headed to the Massif de Charlevoix for the ski lifts, the Empire 47 trail center for some Impossible Climb action, and the Sentiers du Moulin and Vallée Bras du Nord for some of Quebec’s best singletrack.
Of course it wouldn’t be a field test without a Huck to Flat and Impossible Climb and considering these are short travel bikes there was no way I was talking about going out of another efficiency test.
And speaking of doing stuff, Tom Richards, Max Barron and Stefan Licko pointed at the cameras and shouted, “One more time!” about a thousand times; we wouldn’t have any of these videos or photos without their hard work.
Height: 5’10” / 178cm
Lester: 170 lbs / 77 kg
Remarks: Technical writer, allergic to everything
Height: 5’10” / 178cm
Lester: 150 lbs / 68 kg
Remarks: Technical writer, eagerly awaiting the arrival of aliens
Height: 5’7″ / 170cm
Lester: 160 lbs / 72.6 kg
Remarks: Content manager, too fast to be so nice
#Video #Field #Test #Downcountry #Pinkbike