GHOST FR AMR 6.7 AL
£3,499.99 Ghost enter the bike park/freeride ring
With its 165mm of rear travel, you might expect this bike to be aimed at the enduro crowd, but the ‘FR’ tag and coil-sprung rear shock mark the Ghost out as a di erent kind of beast, designed for hitting up bike parks and other gravity-fed fun.
The frame The FR AMR’s aluminium frame helps keeps the price down and uses the same proven four-bar suspension platform as the rest of Ghost’s range. Our large test bike had a healthy 466mm reach, a short 460mm seat tube and stabilityproviding 440mm chainstays. The slack 64.5-degree head angle should breed downhill confidence, while the steep 76-degree e ective seat angle aids climbing, if and when you need to winch yourself back up the hills.
The kit Ghost have specced a Fox DHX2 shock out back. While a coil-sprung damper has potential performance benefits over an air shock for gravity riding, including a suppler start to the stroke, getting the correct spring rate can add additional cost if you need to buy a di erent weight spring. Up front is a 170mm Fox 36 Performance Elite fork, with the new ‘GRIP2’ damper.
A 12-speed SRAM GX Eagle transmission gives you enough gears to ease back up the hills. Magura supply the stopping power, in the form of their MT Fifty4 brakeset, which mixes a four-pot front calliper with a two-pot rear. DT Swiss M 1900 wheels are shod with Maxxis Minion DHF and DHR tyres. The bar and stem are from Ghost’s Ground Fiftyone in-house brand. At 15kg all in, it’s in the right ballpark for a long-travel freeride bike.
The ride Jumping onto the FR AMR, it’s easy to feel settled. When you’re in the saddle, the stubby 35mm stem and relatively steep seat angle ensure you don’t feel too stretched out. The latter also lets you climb in comfort. Even with a coil shock, we never struggled on the ascents, thanks to the geometry and 10-50t cassette.
The slack head angle and long chainstays give the bike great stability over rough ground and in fast turns. In certain situations we struggled with understeer, and we also found it lacked agility compared to some bikes with shorter rear ends, which made it more challenging to drop quickly into tight berms or flick around awkward sections of trail. That said, the geometry promotes a centred riding position, and there isn’t a vast deal of rider movement needed to find grip, which the triple-compound Maxxis tyres are happy to provide.
Good frame sti ness meant we were able to accurately hold any line we chose through rough or o -camber terrain, and never noticed any unwanted flex when pushing hard into berms. The rear suspension soaked up big hits well too, but it felt like we were between spring rates, which meant the DHX2 shock wasn’t quite as sensitive over small bumps as we’d have liked.
The GRIP2-damped fork gives ample support up front and balances out the bike, without any noticeable dive, even with the longer chainstays putting more weight over the front wheel. While the Ghost gets on quietly with its job and does it well, it’s lacking that extra bit of character needed to set it apart from its rivals. LUKE MARSHALL www.hotlines-uk.com