MOUSTACHE SAMEDI 29 GAME 8
Will French brand Moustache’s e-bike tickle our fancy or leave us bristling with indignation?
For those not familiar with Moustache, the name might come across as a bit of a joke, but this French bike firm is a serious player in the e-bike market. To put you in the picture, here are the facts: Moustache has been making e-bikes for nearly 10 years, it produces five models – a hardtail, an adventure bike and three different-travel trail bikes.
The Game is the company’s big-bike platform with 29in wheels, and features a 170mm-travel fork with 160mm rear travel. All the models in the Game range share the same aluminium frameset, Bosch Performance Line CX motor and integrated 625Wh battery. The Game 8 featured here gets a top-of-the-line Fox 38 Float Factory fork with four-way adjustable damping. Out back, the 160mm of travel is controlled by the Magic Grip Control shock, an in-house unit that Moustache says has a more dynamic (lighter) rebound tune, but set-up is no different to, say, a Fox
Float, nor are the colour and function of the rebound and compression adjusters. How does this translate when out on the trail? Put simply, it makes the ride feel lively and more dynamic, so the Game 8 masks its 24.53kg weight really well.
Built into the lower shock mount on the Game 8 is a flip-chip, which allows you to tweak the frame geometry. It comes standard in the low setting but if you remove the fixing bolt and turn over the two alloy cams, it adds 5mm to the bottom height and around half a degree to the head angle. It’s a bit fiddly to do, and I can’t imagine any riding situation where you’d want a sky-high 370mm BB height anyway. To put this into context, it is over 30mm higher than the BB on the 170mmtravel Nukeproof Megawatt tested in this issue. I asked Moustache why the BB is this high and it said, “we like to challenge ourselves on steep technical climbs including rocks and steps, so we always add a little extra BB clearance.” That sort of makes sense, but you could argue fitting shorter cranks would do a similar thing without negatively impacting the handling.
£5,599.99 / 29in / moustachebikes.com
The Game is the company’s bigbike platform