So said Charles Bronson. A man whose film career was a parade of squints, showdowns, and improbable moustaches, all delivered with the air of a bloke who’d rather be fixing a fence somewhere. Always authentic, never shying away from his humble origins. Not saying very much, but speaking volumes as a square jawed Hollywood legend.
Much like myself. Okay maybe not me, but a mountain bike sharing his name. I mean look just look at it- rocking that self confident rugged stance, fronting up to difficult challenges and born ready to crush insurmountable obstacles.
Hmm look at little closer and what’s presented is a boutique product, heavily accessorised by an idiot, most often found bolted to the roof of a posh Audi* More Liberace than Charles. I feel he’d consider it a rather pointless horse. Fair point to be honest because in the “please make it stop” bike insertion policy, the shed was definitely giving some major X-Off** vibes.
No matter, the Bronson was fired in at oblique angle once my extensional crisis on what tiny niche desperately needed to be filled had passed through the standard process of internet surfing, validation from my riding buddies and thinly veiled curation strategies, repurposed as investment cases for a man to whom which “Buy It Now” is not much an option to be considered, as a challenge to be met.
The great thing about a niche is there is no agreed definition for width or depth. So the Bronson niche’ly slips between the 5010 and the Giga. Oh I see a grubby digit raised with the kind of question skewering my 4D bike acquisition strategy. Go on then clever dick, let’s ne having you: “Surely that niche is already occupied by the Propain Hugene you bought about a week ago“.
Firstly it was April 2025 you cheeky scamp – so pretty much a long standing member of the shed community in my world – an secondly it has been ousted to another well trammelled niche marked “For Sale“. Well not yet, but soon because we’ve been dragged back to the “three trail bikes” territory I barely extracted myself from at the back end of last summer,
More of that much later. We’re 500 words in and we’re no wiser to the what, the how and the why. Well that last one is getting a shrift so short you could measure it with a micrometer. As to the what, it’s a 160m air forked, 150mm coil shocked frame somewhere between all day trail and enduro lite.
It’s also last years model so nowhere near as competent as the latest version. Oh sorry when I misspelled “expensive” there. Santa Cruz’s have RRPs similar to their Audi hosting performance packs. This one was less than half of that which does in no way at all to rationalise the scope of the post purchase upgrades.
Forks, shock, seatpost and brakes. This is why I never buy full bikes. False economy although coming from me that suggests some baseline threshold for “economy” never publicly disclosed. In my defence – and I appreciate this is nothing that’d stand up in court – many of those parts came from spares and other bikes. Most certainly. Okay, let’s go with some and move on.
Maybe to how it rides. Probably like a big 5010. Hope so because riding that bike convinced me its bigger brother had investment potential. But it’s not really that much of a bigger brother, more a slightly older annoying sibling. My attempts to increase the distance between the two have so far merely added weight and cost. We’ll see if function follows but with the pilot being drowned by the higher water mark, let’s just pretend it will be.
Report back I shall once it’s been muddied on some real trails. Not yet tho because, well, 2026. It has rained. And then rained some more. Occasionally it stopped raining which appeared to be a pause for the rain to gird its loins in an attempt to submerge the country. It’s like living in a shit version of Avatar.
So done with that. And riding a new bike in these conditions will only confirm terrible mud clearance and difficulty to clean. Still it looks lovely and a quick ride up the farm track suggests it’ll ride lovely as well. Off to Bike Park Wales in two weeks which may chart the inaugural ride and I’m fine with that.
Until then knock the crusted mud off the hardtail and get back out there. Let’s leave the last words to Mr Bronson “Don’t ask me to explain a mystique. I’m just enjoying all this while it lasts. I’m basically doing the same thing I was doing 20 years ago.”
Sounds good to me 😉
*I don’t have one of those, but the might Skoda is close enough. Unless I got to the Surrey hills in which case I’ll need to hire something to be granted access beyond the county boundary.
**A somewhat niche reference to a 1990s network protocol where a transmitter receiving a panic’d X-Off needed to consider that an order not a request***
***Yeah, never worked, Mostly because about 25 countries attempted to ratify a simple rule set to speed early global internet connectivity. Which went as well as you can probably expect especially when some European representatives**** were still trying to get even from the last war.
**** The French. Ah the stories I could tell of the famous “Baguette Protocol Wars“