Late but great
Trail Bike of the Year is finally here and it’s worth the wait...
Getting this issue together has been a long time coming. In more normal circumstances we’d run our Trail Bike of the Year test in spring, to coincide with the usual peak bike buying season, when it would be of use to the most riders possible. But I hardly need to tell you that the new normal is not the old normal, so bike supply and buying patterns have gone out of the window, with no one really sure when, or if, they will return. So here we are, with winter around the corner, in an issue cover dated December 2021, running our 2022 Trail Bike of the Year test. It’s all a bit bonkers. But this has been the first month we’ve been able to get enough of the key players together to make the test worthwhile, and with most of the bikes on test being 2022 models, it actually makes them more relevant going forward. It’s a great line-up too, and having ridden all the models on test, the baseline quality is extremely high. Every bike could be ridden really hard, and splitting them by performance came down to really subtle differences. So while it’s definitely going to be a challenge to source the exact bike you want, it’s nice to know that every bike in the test can be ridden out of its skin.