My head then tells me too put an end to the misery and call it a day on 140mm bikes, the Spicy overwhelmingly wins my heart here and I believe pound for pound and dollar for dollar gives you so much more. Both bikes have certainly improved in the damping department. But when two bikes are this close why would you opt for the one that gives you…less options?
The Spicy is a bike to race enduro, ride with your mates or become a tourist. It gives you more grip, more control, better balance. It’s only too much bike if you don’t do enough riding in the right places. However if you spend most of your time ripping around a surfaced trail centre yes go for the weaker bike. But seeing as this is a long travel weapon of mass destruction and could blow your head clean off, you got ask yourself one question, what kind of rider ARE you? Well? Pussy.
Zesty £4999.99
Spicy £4999.99
THE ZESTY TUNE
SRAM/RockShox offer up a Monarch Plus suitably shimmed
Zesty’s have always been beautiful lightweights with an eye for trouble. Maybe this has something to do with skinny Dijon product managers living in troublesome terrain. Plus the French way, like the Californian way, is marginally different to these shores. UK trail riders spend most of the day going up and hammering down, the French way is slightly more old school – it’s kind of frowned upon to put a short stem on a Zesty.
The early Zesty’s were weak of tune and difficult to understand, a bike that needed more support when you started pounding root more often than gravel. It’s not that Lapierre had the incorrect tune, it’s just that it suited the more composed ride rather than the frenetic.
All has changed for this year with a newer, linear linkage. Torben Borrowy at SRAM presented me with two Monarch Plus shock options, one low compression/low rebound tune with a reduced high volume can tune, and another shock which was medium/low tune. The conditions were far from perfect yet fully of type for this country. Testing.
The Monarch features three compression settings rather than a compression dial (great feature) and in the heavy conditions and over root offered good sensitivity but little in terms of support on the MIN compression with the correct sag setting. A simple switch to the MID compression setting put the bike in a good position for the conditions and yet as this would be the setting I’d use as the softest option for such wet conditions the shock would be clearly too soft at the MIN for even damp weather. SRAM say this was the standard unit for this bike.
Moving to the harder tune. Torben is trouble I tell you, for this shock was a pure cracker. Blatantly obvious it wasn’t off the production line the smoothness was so noticeable, I don’t know how he thinks he’d get away with it! Of course the harder tune was better suited giving me a better middle setting on the compression dial in which I could happily move harder for drier or softer for wetter. The perfect balance. And again a standard tune shock.
With such a range I find it unbelievable that riders will need anything more than stock dampers for this bike (see separate story on tuning). Whilst it is something pretty straightforward to remedy by way of the many independent UK tuners, I believe some of the responsibility lies with your shop to advise on this. Whilst I was unable to try a production Fox on the Zesty the Spicy was pretty bang on with the standard light rebound and medium compression tune Fox.
