Someone on the bus was saying the place is grippier in the wet then dry, very similar to racing lines and tyre marbles in F1, not sure how true that is!
Depends.
The Blues and the vast majority of the red trails have a vary hardpack surface, I’m not sure ‘designed’ is the right word, but if you didn’t consider the huge amount of rain we get in Wales you’d be daft so they stand up to rain very well, like the TCs you rarely get any slippery mud.
As Bus Stranger said, there’s less grip when it’s very dry, the surface tends to get very dusty – it’s nothing like riding in the ‘real world’ when it’s wet, but there’s a bit of slip about and it can be a bit inconsistent – it’s more a mental thing but you can ride the same corner 4 times, 3 times it’s like velcro, 1 time it’ll slide a tiny bit and cause a bit of a rear-end pucker (given the speeds you can get up to).
But that’s not the whole story of course, whilst the blues are smooth and 99.9% mad made, the reds have patches of unsurfaced bits and rocks and polished roots which as we know can be quite slidey.
The Blacks on the other hand, I don’t ride them a lot, I don’t enjoy them, but some of them are ‘lightly built’ more like a cheeky trail in places, and they can be pretty sloppy in the winter – but if you can handle the qualifier on the blacks, you can probably handle a bit of slop.