BOARDMAN MTR 8.6
£1,000 Quality bounce for your buck
Designed for UK riding and boasting trail-ready geometry – shared with the £2,250 MTR 9.0 – and more suspension travel than the other bikes on test, Boardman claim the 8.6 has the ability to “take on the rough and technical without being a burden on flatter, flowy sections.” The questions is, does this incredibly low-priced full-sus steed live up to those claims on the trail?
THE FRAME
Like GT, Boardman use a four-bar Horst-link suspension system, but here the rear shock – a custom-tuned RockShox Deluxe Select – is mounted horizontally. This leaves less room in the front triangle, but there’s still space for a side-entry cage and 550ml bottle. The MTR has 25mm more bumpeating rear-wheel travel than the other bikes here, at 145mm.
Our size-small Boardman looks big even when compared with the medium GT. It has a relatively long 440mm reach and 598mm effective top tube length, combined with a tall stack height of 611mm. The 66-degree head angle is relaxed enough to keep things stable, aided by 440mm chainstays. At 75.5 degrees, the seat tube angle is fairly slack, especially when you consider that, with its longer travel, this bike will sit into its suspension more on climbs, relaxing the angle further.
THE KIT
The 8.6 may be Boardman’s basemodel MTR and the cheapest bike here, but its fork and shock are still the best performers on test. While the SR Suntour XCR 34 fork looks much like the one on the Zaskar FS, it contains an air, rather than coil, spring. This can be easily adjusted to suit different rider weights, using a shock pump. The RockShox shock is also more adjustable than the others here, with both a rebound dial and a lockout lever.
You get a 10-speed Shimano Deore drivetrain and Tektro M285 hydraulic disc brakes, with big 180mm rotors front and rear. Most of the rest of the kit is own-brand, including the wheels, which are wrapped in tubeless-ready 29x2.3in Maxxis tyres – a Minion DHF up front and a DHR II at the rear.
THE RIDE
Its the weight of the Boardman that most betrays its budget price. While it’s in touch with the competition, at 16kg on our scales, and lighter than the GT, that extra heft compared to pricier bikes is felt as soon as the gradient kicks up. This isn’t helped by the slack seat tube, which makes it harder to get your hips over the bottom bracket for
efficient pedalling, or the stretched-out top tube (20mm longer than on the medium GT), which makes it trickier to weight the front wheel for grip. On the plus side, pedal bob is minimal, and replacing the slightly uncomfortable saddle and pushing the replacement as far forward in the seatpost clamp as possible did improve things.
Pointed downhill, the long geometry begins to make sense, offering the space to move around on rough and technical terrain. The fork is the plushest here, yet also offers good support through consecutive hits, neither packing down nor diving through its travel. On smooth, swoopy, blue- and red-graded trails, the 8.6 feels balanced and well-controlled. The Maxxis tyres inspire confidence, delivering the grip needed to lean and push into turns, while the Tektro brakes provide the best power and bite in this group, and are appreciated in steeper sections and when emergency-braking.
Unfortunately, we found we couldn’t get too low over the bike without being kicked by the saddle, because the rigid seatpost can only be dropped 150mm into the frame (on the small size, at least), due to the bend in the seat tube. Add the 100mm minimum insertion height, and you’re left with just 50mm of usable ‘drop’ (by manually loosening the quick-release collar and changing the post’s height in the seat tube), which wasn’t enough for us to feel comfortable when the trails got more technical, and forced a more tentative approach to steps, drops, roots and rocks.
It’s a shame because this bike is clearly capable of far more than we put it through. Careful selection of a dropper post would rectify this issue; in fact, one comes as standard on the next model up, the £1,350 Boardman MTR 8.8.