Secondhand Postilions – Part II – Not the Narrative ‘They're’ Looking For!?

BIKE Magazine aims to feature only the best products and services. If you buy something via one of our links, we may earn a commission.

Editor's Note: We'll be back to Andrew's new used Transition Spire soon. For now, last weekend's Hardline prompted some musings on why this might be the best time ever to consider buying a used bike, and making it new to you.

Taking A Hardline

Josh Bryceland didn’t win this year’s Red Bull Hardline race in Wales. The multi-time World Cup DH winner and 2014 runner-up for the World Championship came in 12th place. He was 13.5 seconds off the winning time – 2:36.545 vs. 2:23.045. Josh’s teammate from Cannondale, Sam Hockenhull, rode across the finish line at 2:53.331. For those keeping track at home, that’s 30.286 seconds behind the winner, Ronan Dunne.

Folks who follow mountain racing will already know this information. Gear nerds who aren’t big on competitive riding but sniff out the new-new will probably know that Dunne was on a prototype Mondraker that, like Rocky Mountain’s new Altitude , appears to be doing a head tube homage to Guerrilla Gravity (RIP). Truly, there was a flock of nifty-looking bikes at Hardline 2024. Only two of them were from way back in 2019. Complete with vestigial shock mounts and one-size-fits-all (XL) geometry to boot.

Yep, okay, the clear winners of this year’s Hardline competition might not be Josh and Sam. These gents are crazy fast, but Josh retired from Elite DH racing after the 2016 season and Sam ‘Dave’ Hockenhull appears to spend as much time ripping his signature hardtail as a full suspension rig. And here they both shredded down the Atherton-instituted course against a field of DH-race-focused athletes on the most current racing rockets.

Still, in my internal narrative at least, all of us regular folk who ride mountain bikes made off like bandits. If a five-year-old rig can rock Hardline? I am sure you get the picture.

Who Is ‘They’ Then?

Oh, it is ‘they’ as in the bicycle industry. The royal ‘they,’ in honour of the two British DH-racer blokes sporting slow-to-load head tube graphics and those of us born into the dominion. Fun fact, Canada didn’t become a fully independent country with its own constitution until 1982.

There were so many brand new bike models dropped this year – many of them over two weeks in April – that I started a rumour that Pinkbike had to clone Brian Park to keep up with the 24/7 coverage and now there are three of him working over there. One to comment on articles, one to herd cats, and one to 3D print me an under-bar GoPro (light) accessory mount for my WZRD one-piece bar stem .

Fully half of the latest bikes use a high pivot and idler (HP+I) suspension system, so this ‘old’ Cannondale tracks there, and in the game of millimeters – Reach & Stack – geometry has changed a massively small amount over the last half-decade. But to make my point, ignoring the freshest-of-the-fresh for a moment, there are still piles of great clear-out bikes, from essentially every bicycle brand, that were designed and manufactured in the years after this Cannondale was conceived. This machine is pre-‘vid!

Hardtails aside, nearly every person I regularly ride with has a bike newer than what Josh & Sam journeyed to Mordor on, and all of them are well-supported in terms of replacement parts and current component standards with close-enough-to-current geometry charts as well.

As someone who’s followed the evolution of full suspension mountain bikes – geometry, suspension technology, the pendulum swings of gram reduction, and “who cares about weight?” – it’s fun that we now are riding these mature examples of every good design in the activity’s history from simple single pivots to is-it-a-six-bar-design-or-a-linkage-driven-four-bar superbikes.

For years folks I know said we would get here. To the point of diminutive improvements that motorbikes, for any application, reached years ago. Why the walking-beam Horst Link suspension design of the Transition Spire I’m riding right now, has a clear evolutionary line from a thirty-year-old Turner Burner. Even if the Spire’s sag is 2/3 of the Burner’s total travel.

No matter how hard ‘new’ is trumpeted from the parapets, and no matter how much marketing mentions fourteen-speed drivetrains, 42mm stanchioned 200mm travel single crown forks, and battery-powered motor-assisted braking it’s all just noise dumped on the foundation of the fact we’ve arrived.

The next edition of Secondhand Postilions was meant to be a bike check on the 2021 Transition Spire I’m riding. And especially, a check-in on the 10-spd Shimano CUES U6000 drivetrain, which I’m trying to treat like a high-end shifting setup. But it’s going to have to wait for part III, because these Cannondale DH bikes, for all their carbon construction and HP+I meets Horst Link suspension system, are a too-good-to-be-true example of exactly the sort of evolutionary molasses that mountain bikes, like dirt bikes before them, are idling in.

To make the point another way, if some of the best riders in the world can thrive – or even survive – the progressive DH course that is Hardline on five-year-old bike designs then, aside from curing boredom, what are any of us regular folks doing absorbing the depreciation of a new rig every year or two?

How many milliseconds are shaved by the next suspension design trend – concentric bottom bracket pivots – and for whom is that a worthwhile trade-off in micro-seconds shaved versus additional complexity and more complicated maintenance?

And all that’s not to say that there aren’t perfectly excellent reasons to buy a fresh mountain bike. First and foremost, you put in the time and can spend your hard-won monies or credit on whatever you want. There also comes an inflection point where a bicycle project needs to become someone else’s bicycle project because you just want something reliable to ride. Plus, not every bike from five years ago deserves the same nod in terms of being fully competitive with what’s being released today.

Parking all those caveats though, at what point in the history of mountain bike racing – XC, Enduro, DH, etc. – would you expect to see a racer on the start line on a five-year-old machine?

Assuming suspension, bearings, and brakes are all overhauled and everything is working fresh-as. From the perspective of someone riding bikes for fun, even on the most challenging terrain, what bike that was fit for purpose five years ago would not be perfectly awesome on the same trails today?

It’s an awesome time to be riding, or buying, but probably not selling, mountain bikes.