Yes - and I LOVE it. But I might not be the best person to ask as it’s my first XC-ish bike in decades, so I have no frame of reference to other XC bikes out there. Have been on trail or enduro bikes for a long time, so this feels like a rocket to me.
It’s taken me a few weeks to get used to the lower travel (I got the 130/120 version) and the faster tires (forecaster/recons) but I’m now feeling confident on spicy and fast DH sections of trail again. Sooooo fun.
My self justification to buy it was BC Bike race next year. I think it will be perfect for that race.
Take it for what it’s worth. This weekend I had a race at a course I also raced at last year. Last year I had a EE7 with no lockouts and 2.4 Rick XC tires. This year I had a E8 with flight attendant and 2.4 dubs. Course conditions and weather seemed to be very similar and my fitness is about the same. Only difference is I’m racing cat 1 this year which is 4 laps opposed to 3 laps as a cat 2. Also, I got second yesterday and first last year.
New MTB wheel day today (DT Swiss XMC 320 carbon rim with 54T 240 hub). I broke my old aluminum wheel on a drop on one of my local trails - a spoke pulled out from the rim. I had been looking for an excuse to upgrade it to a DT Swiss carbon wheel to match my front wheel - so this was my chance.
I wasn’t very happy with the aluminum wheel (a Raceface Turbine). I pinch flatted easily on it. It was very difficult to seat tires tubeless. And very difficult to unseat tires. (Compared to the DT Swiss I have on front).
Looking at the pics below you can see how rim design really matters. The DT Swiss carbon rim has thicker walls - meaning less prone to pinch flats. The channel in the middle is less steep (harder to see in the pics, but noticeable in person), meaning easier to seat tires tubeless. And the DT Swiss rim does not have a depression next to the wall, meaning easier to unseat tires. On this latter point, I had to use a clamp to squeeze the tire walls together to get them to unseat from the Raceface. There was zero chance of doing it by hand. Had I been out on the trail and needed to unseat the tire to put in a tube, I would have been out of luck.
The DT Swiss wheel is almost 100g lighter. I thought the weight difference would have been more - but I guess Raceface keeps the weight down in part by speccing narrow rim walls (hence pinch flat prone).
These DT Swiss wheels are more expensive for sure, but they’re noticeably better than other wheels I’ve had on MTBs.
I’m planning to make a trip to Moab in a couple
of weeks. Will give the new wheel a good test.
It might be a silly question to ask, but if you put the bike and suspension aside do you think a lot of your time is derived from the tire swap from Rick to Dubs or do you feel the Dubs offer more consistent traction?
wheels don’t flex significantly vertically and tires are big enough to make up for the lack of suspension. Suspension losses are extremely significant in the vast majority of off road courses hence the importance of full suspension bikes. Also a rear triangle barely flexes.
Smaller high frequency repeated ‘bumps’ are better absorbed by tires, not suspension - that is why its not such a thing in gravel. Big bumps = suspension more useful.
The full suspension gravel bike has the same problems as the Supercal and Epic World Cup. There’s such small window where they even theoretically have better performance or characteristics than the standard XC full suspension.
You get all the maintenance complexity and weight of the full suspension frame, and the only real benefit is the geometry is designed for drop bars (which can be a headache inducing retrofit to flat bar mtbs).
I ride a flex stay gravel bike that claims 25mm rear “travel” and it’s a lot like the Lauf fork that never really took off. Back to back with a road bike you notice it like you would a low pressure 2.0+ tire, and even that is frequently a turn off. I can’t imagine the Checkout doesn’t ride just like a mountain bike, when most people looking for a gravel bike really want something that is a road bike on roads with just enough capacity to keep speed on unpaved sections.
I have an easier time understanding a FS gravel bike than a Supercaliber or Epic WC. With a FS gravel bike you can get road(ish) q-factors, snappier geometries (which are handy while riding in a group) and proper drop bar steering geometry. I tried a couple of drop bar MTB conversions and the steering sucked
