JAMIE’S SPECIALIZED TURBO KENEVO SL COMP

MONTH 16: Forget the mind-muscle connection, JD has been using the training feature on the Mission Control app to boost his gains

£7,400 • 29in • specialized.com

Mindlessly scrolling is a national pastime, but I’ve found something better to do on my phone. Getting to know the Specialized Mission Control app. It can diagnose and fix problems with your bike, customise the power and battery consumption, log your rides, and plenty more besides. It’s taken me more than a year to take much interest in it though, the thinking being I’ll just ride the bike and let the tech sort itself out.

What changed was a fault code on a recent wintery ride, flashing up on the top tube, and a corresponding lack of power from the bike. I cursed the biking gods for their malevolence in wrecking my ride, before pulling out my phone to diagnose the problem. Turns out,

I’d forgotten to swap the magnet over when switching rear wheels, and as such the speed sensor couldn’t work. Sheepishly, I headed home (and made a sacrifice to the gods as way of apology).

The app had sucked me back in though, and I found great pleasure in customising the display, letting me bring up all kinds of data, some more useful than others. Learning how big your last jump was, and how many you’ve boosted cumulatively is certainly interesting, but of more practical use was the power outputs from both rider and bike, and the ratio between the two. Incredibly, I could make the bike pump out more than nine times as many watts as my legs could, simply by revving it up and then suddenly backing off, encouraging the motor’s overrun to do more work. This on a bike that’s sold as two times your power.

More useful still is the heart rate function, it’ll let you set your desired heart rate for a training ride, then the motor will kick in and out to keep you in the sweet spot. This works really bloody well, it’s quick to react and unnervingly predictive in knowing when your rate of work is about to change. Where it came unstuck was riding up anything really steep; the Kenevo

WHY IT’S HERE Diet e-bikes, the best or worst of both worlds?

An outage warning woke Jamie up to the power of self-monitoring

THE RIDER JAMIE DARLOW Position Front section editor Mostly Rides Surrey Hills Height 6ft 1in Weight 82kg THE BIKE ■ Lightweight e-bike, splitting the weight difference between the full-power Kenevo and regular Enduro ■ Less than half the power of a full-fat e-bike, with 240W and 35Nm of torque, and a small 320Wh battery (with optional 160Wh range extender) ■ Entry-level Turbo Kenevo SL gets Fox Performance suspension, Fox Rhythm fork and SRAM GX drivetrain, but retains the full carbon frame ■ Progressive geometry and sizing makes the Kenevo SL a full-blown enduro bike