M AY 2 019 mbr 85
it got, but that hadn’t been the case with the 27.5in
Rocket. I guess I was once bitten, twice shy.”THE LOOP OF TRUTH
Living on the edge of Sheffi eld and working in the
Peak District, Cy has no shortage of trails on which
to evaluate his bikes, but one 15-minute loop is key to
every prototype development — The Loop of Truth.
This starts from the Lady Cannings trail centre car
park, takes in a lap of Blue Steel before a quick up and
down of the rock-strewn Jumble Road bridleway.
A blue-graded trail might seem an odd place to
test a bike when you’re surrounded by stunning
natural trails but there’s a logic to this. While the
Peak has plenty of boulder-strewn, fl at-out trails,
tight and twisty fl ow trails are much harder to fi nd.
A mountain bike should be a versatile tool and this
trail represents one end of the riding spectrum.
It’s also the trail that proved to Cy that Longshot
worked everywhere. That a longer, slacker bike
worked on rough, high-speed trails wasn’t really
a revelation. That it worked so well on tight and
twisty trails was.
As Cy points out, this kind of geometry is often
labelled as being for aggressive riding, but heSINGLE-RING
DRIVETRAINS HAVE
MADE BIKES
SIMPLER AND
MORE DURABLE
Boulder-strewn trails put
the Rocket Max on a
weaving trajectoryCotic’s signature steel
tubing helps it stand
out from the crowd