Well, after reading Weeksy’s excellent Charge thread, i thought id post up some comments after a visit to Afan this weekend.
TBH, I’m amazed at how well the bike handled. Despite the fact all the trials were wet, it was comfortable, never got me into trouble (well, once but that was user error). I guess one minor niggle is that Evoloution fork doesn’t feel as smooth as the 2012 FIT fork on the other bike – but I wouldn’t notice that on any other than the really rough stuff that’s developed at top of Graveyard. I’m astounded at how well the maestro system just works – little if any movement on the shock up climbs, and I barely noticed it moving going down, although it did. Both front and rear felt smoothly damped after I got about 6″ of air on Energy. Even the Schwalbe performance tyres gripped without failure all weekend on the wet rocks and roots – with the thicker sidewalk will I ever buy the expensive ones again?. The bike as a whole seems to carry a lot of energy / momentum allowing a real pace to be developed in flats and rollers, I carried loads of speed there.
The biggest problem I had was reigning in the pace of the bike on Darkside after a couple of days and when I was tired. The bike just wants to push on.
I’m very happy and I feel I’ve got a lot of bike/ potential for my money, only bettered by a chap on the same bike that paid £1k for his via a employee discount.
Overall, taking a 100mm xc bike to Wales was a bigger success than I could have ever imagined.
*smiles*