ROB’S TREK SLASH £4,050 (frame only)

For our tech-editor-in-chief, perhaps simpler is better

With Bike of the Year done and dusted, I’ve been back out riding the Slash regularly and loving it. Well, for the most part. There’s no denying how much fun and confidence I get from the bike, but it turned out that during my short hiatus, I’d forgotten how to tweak the settings of its autoadjusting RockShox Flight Attendant suspension system.

On my first lengthy ride post-BOTY, I needed to tweak the compression damping. It took me some time, and the use of my phone and the SRAM AXS app, to get this done. Maybe it’s my haggard old brain struggling to retain information, but at that point, out in the wild, there was a bit of me that just wanted to twiddle a dial. That said, once I’d figured out how to do it, it took me a matter of seconds to adjust things, and me forgetting how to do it is largely down to how regularly I switch between bikes – something not everyone has to worry about.

Ahead of my next big outing, I was sure to charge all the batteries (four, if you include the AXS gears and dropper post). That evening, I was setting up another test bike (this one had Fox’s rival, wired Live Valve suspension system) when I noticed the Flight Attendant module on the Slash’s RockShox ZEB fork flashing to signal that it was in ‘safe mode’. This warning normally pops up when one of the batteries is low on charge, so I couldn’t figure out why it was happening. I chucked the fork battery back on charge, removed the shock battery and put everything back on in the morning. It was a classic ‘switch everything off and on again’ move, but it seemed to work. I’m still not sure what happened, but the system has been fine since.

Most importantly, it didn’t impact on my recent ride with the rest of the MBUK team at Cwmcarn Forest in South Wales. The Cafall trail was dry and blown-out, the Pedalhounds descent properly beaten-up, and the Slash felt superb and really wellbalanced when sectioning this track for pictures. Once we were done, it was great to be able to have a full run down and really push the bike. The Flight Attendant system continued to work just as it should, and I’m hoping this’ll be the last head-scratching moment for some time now.