From 26 inch to 29 inch
Am I now a believer? After riding a Specialized 29 inch bike for a while it may just be possible to go as quick as i do on a 26 inch bike. This is a quick review of the Specialized SJ HT Alloy 29er.
It’s been a fairly tumultuous time for me in regards to bikes over the last year with 3 bike industry job changes and resultantly 6 different bikes. So when it came to choosing my new bike I just wanted something to get me through a Woodend winter.
I was looking at a 26 inch Stumpjumper HT Comp Carbon and was pretty happy with that choice as I had been riding 26 inch hardtails for years. However during the day I thought I would just go for a roll on a 29 inch hardtail out the front of the shop to see what the Specialized offerings in that range are like.
Wow, what was going on here, it turned like a 26 inch bike. Completely different to other 29ers that I’d ridden before. So I went back inside to quiz DC as to why. The short of it is that the Big Red S have tuned and dialled in a geometry that has shortened the bike significantly and allowed it to have sharper handling off road.
So I have decided to ride an alloy HT 29er for a few months and with a retail price including a few mods of under $3000 it’s probably the cheapest bike I’ve had since 1992.
I’ve kept the standard specs but I’ve put on a carbon seat post, carbon XO cranks and converted to tubeless and it weighed in at 11.3kg, not too bad for a stock alloy 29er.
So my first ride started at 6.15 am on Saturday morning before work. As I entered the first single track I was pleasantly surprised. It really did go around corners quicker, the smoother the radius of the corner the faster it went. On fire roads it was obviously quicker and even in single track that required a degree of muscling the bike around, it felt almost comparable. I honestly think that if it was the same weight as previous carbon HT 26ers I’ve had (about 9.5ish) that it’d be so close in performance I wouldn’t like to call it.
Second ride was the Duael Pairs race held on my tracks in Woodend with an almost equal time on fire roads and single track it was going to be a good test of overall capability under racing conditions. I took Sugarlips Hurley on a practice lap and dropped him in the single track so it was certainly fast enough there. The fire roads were great on it, really smooth but towards the end of the six hours I did start to slow down in the single track. Again I can’t help but wonder if this is purely a weight issue as this bike is easily 1.5 kgs heavier than my last carbon HT, but as said before this beast was $6000 less.
I will be quite happy to ride this bike for a winter as I think if you look at the time gained on faster paced tracks versus the time lost, if any, on more technical singletrack then I certainly didn’t lose any time overall.
I’m already scheming of getting a S-Works 29er HT for summer.
