Only the very best hardtails will receive our coveted Hardtail of the Year award
fter what seems like a lifetime, we’re back on track with our Hardtail of the Year test. In the three years that have passed since our last hardtail bonanza, a lot has changed. Covid put a spanner in the works of production, bike prices rocketed as availability shrunk. And in the latest blow to consumer confidence, inflation is eating away at our spending power. Which makes our Hardtail of the Year test more important than ever before.
And while we’d love to say that our 2022 test is the biggest and best to date, given the current climate, that would have been an impossible task. In fact, looking back we can’t believe just how good we had it. In 2018 we had 18 bikes in total, evenly split across three price points. Then we tweaked the format for 2019 to deliver a new sub-£375 price point, with four separate categories in one massive test with 24 hardtails.
But like so many things post-covid, we’ve had to adapt. As such, we’ve adopted the same format as our Trail Bike of the Year test, splitting the bikes into two distinct categories: Shop Bought and Direct Sales, both at a single sub-£1k price point. And the reason is obvious: getting bikes at lower price points is still proving incredibly difficult and price hikes make that harder than ever before.
One thing hasn’t changed though, we still allocate a single test rider to each category to ensure that the highest possible test standards are maintained. And the decision to split the test isn’t just about direct-sales brands having a competitive advantage. Yes, that’s important, but it’s also true that many people, especially new riders, aren’t comfortable receiving a bike in a box on their doorstep. And that’s where the traditional bike shop plays a key part.
And who better to brave the current storm than the heavyweights of the industry? Kona, Trek, Specialized and Whyte are all represented in the shop-bought category. And if you’ve been following along, you’ll have noticed that most of these bikes would probably have been in our sub-£800 category three years ago. But hey, that seems like the new norm, so we’ll be comparing the 2022 bikes to each other, not models from the past.
In the direct-sales category we only have two bikes and it was not for the want of trying. B’twin has a new trail hardtail arriving at the end of the summer, and the entry-level Canyon Stoic 2 has proved so popular we couldn’t get hold of one for this test. Fingers crossed we’ll have both bikes for review by the end of the summer.
So the direct-sales section of the test is really a head-to-head. And what it lacks in quantity it more than makes up for with quality: the Voodoo Bizango Pro and the Vitus Sentier, easily the winningest bikes from years past.
In our last Hardtail of the Year test the
Vitus Sentier VR threw shade on big names like Nukeproof and Ragley to win the Blue Riband £1,000 category, but neither of those brands field a bike in that price range anymore. Meanwhile, the Sentier on test here is £50 cheaper than the version that won in 2019. So what gives? Well, all the Sentier bikes have gone up in price, making the VR too expensive for this test, but such is Vitus’s competitive advantage through owners Chain Reaction Cycles/wiggle, we were able to drop down a level to the cheapest model and sneak in under the £1k limit.
We’ve lost track of how many times the Voodoo Bizango has won its price category in our Hardtail of the Year test. But it’s always operated in a bit of a fiscal no-man’s land, with the real value-for-money heavy hitters sitting above and below it in price. With the addition of the Pro version, Voodoo is definitely taking the fight to Vitus.
Which bikes come out on top in each category of this year’s test remains to be seen, but one thing is guaranteed, only the very best hardtails will receive our coveted Hardtail of the Year award.