Liv Intrigue Advanced 1 – Easy Climbing Meets Playful Descending

For 2019, the Liv Intrigue has returned to the women’s specific brand line-up. This is after taking a couple of years off in 2016 to allow for the Pique SX and Hail Enduro bikes to make an entrance.

I attended the product launch for the new Intrigue, which was held in Squamish, BC, and I made some very good first impressions with the bike. However the model I tried was not one of the ones available in the UK.

The Intrigue Advanced is aimed at women who want to push their riding further, by balancing good climbing with a confidence inspiring setup when descending. It claims to be the all-around-capable mountain bike of the Liv range.

Looking at the full Liv range, the Intrigue sits between the Pique SX and the Hail. For those after a lightweight XC bike with 120mm rear travel, 140mm up front, the Pique SX would be your bag. At the other end, the Hail comes with a generous 160mm rear, 170mm front travel and a relaxed head angle aimed at steep, technical terrain.

Offering a seemingly perfect balance of the two, we have three models in the Intrigue range.

Of the three models in the range, our UK options are the Advanced 1 and 2 in XS, S and M sizes.

The model I gathered my first impressions on was the Advanced 0 from the US range, which features a DVO custom-tuned fork and shock compared to Fox suspension throughout the UK range. The US model is available up to a size L, which unfortunately isn’t considered to be needed by us here in the UK.

The cheapest in the range is the Advanced 2 at £2,999, featuring Fox 34 Rhythm forks at 150mm and a Fox Float DPS shock. It comes with a SRAM NX Eagle 1×12 drivetrain, SRAM Guide T brakes and is available in a gloss black/teal gradient.

The Advanced 1 is the top of the UK range with upgraded Fox 36 Performance Elite forks, Fox Float DPX2 shock, GX Eagle 1×12 drivetrain and SRAM Guide RS brakes, putting this model at £3,999. This model is available in a gloss black/metallic red gradient.

I have spent a total of five months testing the Intrigue Advanced 1, with the intention of seeing if this bike is being targeted correctly, and if it can withstand UK weather. Being sold as a trail bike for riders that want to push themselves, it sounds like the step you’d take before getting yourself an enduro bike.

Let’s take a closer look at the build.

The Bike

Straight out the box this bike looks great. The gradient paint design with a gloss finish is devilish-looking with a feminine edge to it, and the colour coordination is just enough to look considered without it being overkill. As standard the Advanced 1 comes with a great spec that is balanced out with several Giant components to keep the cost down. Bars, stem, seat post, saddle and rims are all courtesy of Giant Bikes, the older brother of Liv.

The frame is a combination of a carbon front triangle and an aluminium rear triangle, and is built following the Liv 3F Design Philosophy – an engineering and design process based on Fit, Form and Function.

To start with, it takes data on women’s geometry, proportions, strength and muscular activity when riding a bike and uses all that information to come up with an initial frame design. Liv then uses its sponsored athletes to test the prototype, taking all feedback on board in order to produce the final design.

The head angle has been updated from the 2016 model, previously 68° now at 66.5°. The new Intrigue also has a steeper seat tube angle of 74.5°.

So on paper, this updated frame design is a more aggressive than the previous model, hence the target audience being riders who want to up their game.

Working alongside the women’s specific frame geometry, the bike comes with fork and shock tuned to suit female riders. As previously mentioned, our UK models come with Fox suspension. We’ve got a 36 Float Performance Elite 150mm fork upfront, and a trunnion mounted Float DPX2 Performance shock to the rear.

As for the drivetrain, there’s not really a bad word I could say about a full SRAM GX Eagle setup – I never had the gears slip, never dropped the chain and I also neglected to clean the bike on many occasions, so that should give you a good indication of the performance.

Other frame features include a built in bash guard, internal cable routing, a very well designed chain guard (it didn’t move once) and room for a bottle cage on all sizes/models.

The Advanced 1 comes with carbon 27.5in Giant TRX 0 Boost wheelset, 30mm internal width with tubeless Maxxis High Roller II, 2.4in front and 2.5in rear. The wheelset is compatible up to 2.6in. The hubs are Giant Level 2 with an XD driver body, so the option is there to throw a 10T cog on and increase your gear range.

Before moving on to the finer details, it seems fair to let you readers know my riding background to put some perspective on my review. I threw myself in the deep end when I started mountain biking, happily taking up any invitation to a gnarly uplift or a race out of my capabilities, which has given me a good level of confidence and the ability to get myself through rough terrain.

In recent years I’ve found my happy place – natural trails with big climbs that earn me my technical descents. Through enjoying my riding more I’ve become a lot faster and more controlled, which in turn has made me much more confident in the air, however I enjoy being challenged by line choices more than big jumps and drops.

Set Up

I am riding a size medium, which is the largest option in the UK range. Initially this bike did feel too short for me, a combination of my knee hitting the bar ends if I went ‘full lock’ and also feeling like my weight was too far over the front. After a bit of tweaking with the saddle position it felt a little less cramped.

I followed the Fox suspension setup guide for the fork as a starting point and found that I was blowing through the travel really easily. A combination of increasing the pressure, playing with the rebound and lowering the sag left me still feeling like I wasn’t getting the most out of the fork. So I checked for tokens, and found there to be none.

According to the Fox website, these forks usually come with two tokens as standard, meaning the female specific tune is just the lack of tokens that weren’t sent with the bike for if you wanted to add them.

I spent several rides trying to tune the suspension, getting increasingly more frustrated with not knowing where I was going wrong, but from the moment I added a token I managed to get it dialled.

I would consider myself taller than the average female rider at 5’7, and I do ride faster/more aggressive than an average female rider just getting into trail riding which is who this bike is aimed at. The absence of tokens didn’t suit me, but I don’t think I fall into the target market for this bike.

Other changes I made to the setup include the saddle and exchanging the Giant bars for my own SQLab bars with a 16° backsweep. The bars are a very personal preference related to a wrist and shoulder injury, and are deserving of their own review. In short, they take stress off the joints and give me a lot more time in the saddle without old injuries haunting me.

As for the saddle, the Liv Contact SL made me feel like my legs were being forced out of their sockets. Saddle comfort is subjective, in this case the standard one didn’t suit me, but that’s not to say it wouldn’t be a great fit for someone else.

Climbing

The Intrigue Advanced made me feel like my fitness had improved overnight. Tight switchback climbs were no issue – previously I would rarely manage to combine the manoeuvre with the power needed, but having my weight slightly further forward than normal increased my control over the steering and added traction.

I also found the 780mm bars gave me good control over the front end, being used to using 800mm bars. Long slogs up fire roads are never fun, but having a light bike with a good gear range made them a lot more tolerable.

One issue I had with climbing was down to the seatpost length. The Intrigue comes with a 100mm travel Giant Contact Switch S dropper, which just isn’t long enough for someone my height. To add to the inconvenience, the seat clamp is a twin bolt, making it take that little extra faff on the trail when I needed to manually adjust the height of the seatpost.

Descending

Now for the important part, pointing downhill. As I’ve previously mentioned, the bike felt a bit too short for me but I did find some advantages to that. Through tight switchbacks and technical, awkward trails it was nimble and easy to get the front end where I wanted it. Lower speed rides that didn’t offer too much of a challenge were a lot of fun, as it’s a playfully short bike.

So when I wasn’t riding to my full potential, this bike felt fun. However, as soon as I started to ride more aggressive trails or riding at higher speeds, it became apparent that the shorter length was holding me back.

On these sorts of trails, I was tiring myself out holding my weight in the correct position and I didn’t feel much stability or confidence in it. Riding steep trails when my weight was naturally too far forward was a challenge, and the bike couldn’t perform to its full potential with this incorrect weight distribution.

The occasion when I felt particularly under-biked was when I went to Revolution Bike Park. A fast, steep, technical park on a trail bike will always offer the risk of fun limitation, but I’ve previously been there on a bike with 20mm less travel front and back and had a good time.

On the Intrigue though, I couldn’t carry the speed I wanted to and the braking bumps were particularly harsh. Although I found some relief in adding a couple of clicks of rebound as I managed to skip over a lot of the rough stuff, on the whole I felt rattled and although I was having to hold myself back.

Some stability and confidence was certainly found in the wheel and tyre combination. Giant carbon rims at 30mm furnished with 2.5in/2.4in Maxxis High Roller II offer a nice plush ride. The brakes offer enough stopping power for the bike at controlled speeds, but any time I pushed it to my limits I did find myself nipping the Guide RS brakes to pull back slightly, as I didn’t trust them to stop me.

Living with the Liv

I’ve used and abused this bike for a total of five months, and I really have abused it. It has been to several uplifts, been pushed to its limits and experienced weather extremes suitable for a disaster movie.

When it comes to durability, most of my concerns are cosmetic. The first sign of wear came after only a handful of rides – the gloss lacquer began to rub off the top tube thanks to my baggy waterproofs. The grips also haven’t survived, becoming torn after a couple of months.

I found the seatpost shared my partner’s view on rides in the cold, in that it sometimes refused to come out. We experienced a particularly cold winter, and any days the temperature was below around 4°C, the post would stick.

The only other irritation I had was the shock mount creating a compartment for dirt to hide in. If you have a hosepipe to clean your bike with, and you clean it after each ride then it’s not really that big a deal, but if I were to buy this bike I would get fed up of teasing dried mud out of there.

Three Things That Could Be Improved

1. Seatpost length and ability to function in the cold
2. Provide the tokens for the fork, not all women are petite
3. Make the large frame available in the UK

Three Things That We Loved

1. Wide rims with aggressive trail tyres
2. SRAM GX Eagle drivetrain is faultless
3. Room for a bottle cage on all models

Overall

For the average female rider looking to up their riding game with a confidence inspiring trail bike, I think the Intrigue could be a great choice.

However, if you’re already quite confident and you don’t fall into the average female rider measurements that Liv used when designing the Intrigue, then you might feel it holds you back. I’m too tall to feel stable at high speeds on a short bike, but it didn’t stop me having a load of fun. This bike eats up tight switchback descents, it’s nimble through tricky technical sections, feels really solid when landing jumps and drops, and it climbs so well that it could be extending your adventure.

2019 Liv Intrigue Advanced 1 Specifications

• Frame // Advanced-Grade Composite front triangle, ALUXX SL-Grade Aluminum rear triangle, 140mm travel
• Fork // Fox 36 Float Performance Elite, 150mm travel, FIT4 Damper, Boost 15x110mm KaBolt, tapered steerer
• Shock //Fox Float DPX2
• Hubs // Level 2 hubs (F) Boost 15x110mm, (R) Boost 12×148, XD Driver body
• Rims // Giant TRX 1, 30mm inner width, 27.5 hookless carbon WheelSystem
• Tyres // Maxxis High Roller II 27.5in, Front 2.5in Rear 2.4in
• Crankset // TruVativ Descendent 6k Eagle Dub, 30
• Rear Mech // SRAM GX Eagle
• Cassette // SRAM GX Eagle, 10×50
• Brakes // SRAM Guide RS
• Stem // Giant Contact SL 35, 35mm
• Bars // Giant Contact SL TR35, 780x35mm, 20mm rise
• Seatpost // Giant Contact Switch S dropper post with remote lever, 30.9mm
• Saddle // Liv Contact SL
• Size Tested // Medium
• Sizes available // XS, S, M
• Weight // 12.8kg
• RRP // £3999

Review Info

Amanda Wishart

Art Director

Amanda is our resident pedaller, who loves the climbs as much as the descents. No genre of biking is turned down, though she is happiest when at the top of a mountain with a wild descent ahead of her. If you ever want a chat about concussion recovery, dealing with a Womb of Doom or how best to fuel an endurance XC race, she's the one to email.

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