CHRIS’S VITUS ESCARPE 29 VRX £2,999.99

A pro’s touch has brought out the best in the Vitus

A brief fling with an e-MTB in the Alps (more on that in a future issue) means I haven’t taken out my beloved Escarpe that much this month. But what my recent riding on the Vitus has lacked in quantity, it’s made up for in quality, because I went for a day of coaching with Focus Trail Team rider Joe Connell, at Glyncorrwg in South Wales.

As well as being an all-round nice guy with an infectious, cheeky smile, Joe really knows his stuff when it comes to getting the most from your bike. I thought I’d got the Vitus nicely dialled, but it wasn’t long before Joe shouted me to a halt – two minutes of climbing over rocks on the singletrack ascent was all his trained eye needed to identify problems with my set-up.

He checked my tyre pressures and discovered I was running a lot less than I should’ve been. This explained why I’d been having to really wrench the bar over the rocky features on the way up and why the bike had felt so wallowy.

One characteristic of the Escarpe that I’ve had some trouble getting accustomed to is its length (compared to what I was riding before, anyway), but pumping the tyres up put me in control and made an astonishing difference. I was amazed how good it felt. But Joe hadn’t even got started. Everything we rode, he had a neat hack to make it easier.

Before we’d even done any descending, I’d learned a ton about the Vitus, and by the time we hit the first downhill I felt like a different rider on a different bike.

I realise this is elementary for many people, but just taking half an hour to practise braking technique meant that by the end of the day I was throwing the Escarpe down black-graded features with carefree abandon, where previously I’d have been standing at the top of a rock slab working out the easiest way to walk down it without falling over!

Unfortunately, my Brand-X Ascend dropper post was playing up, and by the end of the day I had a blister on my thumb from the overly-stiff lever and the post itself was sagging – but that was a small price to pay for my day with Joe. Look out for a feature on it soon. www.vitusbikes.com