Scott Genius Mountain Bike Review After 150 miles | Love It

Scott Genius Mountain Bike Review after 150 miles, Thumbs Up! I now use this mountain bike as my primary. It is my favorite! Scott’s Genius was already a challenge to understand. It has 130 mm of travel and is paired with a 140 millimeter travel Fox 34 FIT4 fork. Lighter than the crowd of all mountain contenders, the Genius has more suspension than most of the lightweight trail and XC set. Its suspension features a unique TwinLoc handlebar remote that operates in three modes: open allowing front and rear to operate at full travel; traction–in which the front stays open but rear travel reduces to 90 mm, and compression damping stiffens; and closed front and rear suspension both lock out. To further tweak genre purists, Scott has made room for a pair of fat Schwalbe Nobby Nic 2.8 inch tires rolling on wide Syncros TR 1.5 rims. SRAM X01 cranks, shifter and rear derailleur handle shifting and pedaling duties, RockShox Reverb does the seat drop and Shimano XTR brakes slow things down on this highend bike. Scott also offers an adjustable head angle, via a pair of eccentric cups in the headtube, as well as bottom bracket height adjustment enabled by a flip chip on the seatstay. We kept the head angle slack at 67.5 degrees, and, after trying to dig our way to the center of the earth with severe pedal strikes in benign terrain, we decided to run the high 13.4 inch setting. The chief upside of the plus size tires can be summed up in one word: traction. Tons of it everywhere, all the time, regardless of ground surface. Running the tires around 10 to 11 PSI, there is a supplemental suspension effect that obliterates small, high frequency trail garbage. Having taken the lightweight route to getting fat, the Genius Plus still climbs and pedals with surprising alacrity. However, the flip side of those light tires and wheels can be felt when loading hard into turns and jumps and plowing into rock gardens. More pressure is needed to prevent the tires from rolling, and with that, the traction benefits start to fade. The tires are also a bit fragile for pinging hard into rocks. Wikipedia says: A mountain bike or mountain bicycle (abbreviated Mtn Bike, MTB; or ATB, for all-terrain bicycle) is a bicycle designed for off-road cycling. Mountain bikes share similarities with other bikes, but incorporate features designed to enhance durability and performance in rough terrain. These typically include suspension on the frame and fork, large knobby tires, more durable heavy duty wheels, more powerful brakes, and lower gear ratios needed for steep grades with poor traction. Mountain bikes are typically ridden on mountain trails, fire roads, logging roads, single tracks and other unpaved environments. These types of terrain commonly include rocks, washouts, ruts, loose sand, loose gravel, roots, and steep grades (both inclines and declines). Mountain bikes are built to handle this terrain and the obstacles that are found in it like logs, vertical drop offs, and smaller boulders. Since the development of the sport in the 1970s many new subtypes of mountain biking have developed, such as cross-country (XC) biking, all-day endurance biking, Freeride-biking, downhill mountain biking, and a variety of track and slalom competitions. Each of these place different demands on the bike requiring different designs for optimal performance. MTB development has included an increase in suspension, typically up to 8" or 203mm, and gearing, up to 30 speeds, to facilitate both climbing and rapid descents. However, advancements in sprocket design has recently led to the "1x (pronounced one by)" trend, simplifying the gearing to one Chainring/Sprocket in the front and multiple sprockets on the rear of the drive train, more commonly, 9, 10 or 11 .