Lapierre Zesty AM CF 6.9

The 150mm-travel Zesty’s floating shock design (where the damper is suspended between the rocker link and chainstay, not attached to the mainframe) gives it an impeccably smooth-feeling rear end, with the back wheel free to track the ground with minimal interference from pedals or brakes. With the anchors off, it’s an impressively fast bike.

The suspension effortlessly soaks up hits both big and small, and, as long as you’ve got the damping set up fast enough to recover from repeated impacts, it’ll blast you towards the next corner at high speed. In this situation, you may find the basic SRAM G2 R brakes lacking in grunt, even with a 203mm front rotor. Fortunately, the same can’t be said for the 150mm-travel Fox 36 fork, which will help you get out of a hole or two.

The bike’s willingness to get towards the end of its travel means it doesn’t have the get-up-and-go we look for in a trail bike winner, however. Adding extra air to the shock gives you more of this, but also makes it harder to obtain full travel and causes the bike to lose that smooth quietness we so enjoyed on faster, rougher descents. We preferred to run lower pressures, which meant we had to put in more effort than usual to push the bike to its point of support when pumping between turns or into the lip of a jump. Sprints from corner to corner often became less enthusiastic as the day wore on.

Uphill, as the bike settles into its travel the 75-degree seat angle becomes slacker still, making the front end feel higher than the geometry chart suggests. Furthermore, while the supple back end helps the Minion DHR II tyre find grip, it mean Watts are wasted, unless you flick the shock’s lockout lever. Despite the carbon frame, the Zesty AM is also relatively heavy, due in part to its fairly heavy wheelset and hefty NX Eagle cassette.

The GX Eagle cranks and mech are an aesthetic improvement over the NX equivalents, and Lapierre’s own finishing kit all works well, although we’d like to see 20mm or so added to bar widths across all sizes, and our dropper post lever’s barrel adjuster was too stiff. While the frame feels well-finished, it has some quirks – pivots secured with circlips, a storage pouch accessed via a 3mm Allen bolt that fills with mud, and a chainstay protector that caught on our shoes frustratingly frequently.