Issue 162: Good enough for ya?

Chipps reckons that bikes are good enough these days, aren’t they? But good enough for what?

Progress marches on. Time waits for no bike rider and we all bow to the inevitable steamroller of progress, right? The mountain bikes we ride these days are a world apart from those heavy, rattly old puncture-magnets we used to ride (and push) around the hills in our youth.

Or are they? I’ve always been a champion of the thought that mountain bikes got ‘good enough’ for the majority of us a decade or more ago. Suspension worked, brakes stopped, droppers dropped, tubeless tyres kept the air in and gear shifters worked with minimal effort over a wide enough range of gears. In general, for most riders, the bike was no longer the limiting factor. That now fell to us, its pilots.

But that’s not how progress works. Designers don’t suddenly sit back, shut down laptops and 3D CAD stations and wonder what job they need next, just because they’ve ‘solved’ mountain bikes. There will always be room for improvement, whether that’s in small, incremental steps, saving 1.5g here and 3.5 Watts there, or in the form of massive paradigm shifts like gearboxes, wireless shifting and radial tyre carcasses.

re you old enough to remember how to balance the choke lever on a car to get it started on a cold morning? Or the numb buzz you had after a long journey of high, lumpy revs, sat on a sagging bucket seat, wrestling with a lack of power steering? There’s no denying that older cars from the ’60s and ’70s look pretty cool to our modern eyes, but would you really want to drive one every day?

You could even argue that cars got ‘good enough’ in the early 2000s, with fuel injection, comfier cabins, and demisters that actually worked. But back then satnavs were still outshone by the graphics on a Game Boy, you had to use a key to start the engine and entertainment was limited to Radio 2 or your Best of Queen CD (and your minidisc changer in the boot…).

Just as cars these days, even modern used ones, now come with technology unheard of a decade ago, so it is that mountain bikes just inevitably come with more and more tech, whether that’s wireless shifting, clever shocks, or just a functioning cable dropper post. The aim of all of this, though, is to remove the distractions, manual actions and breakages that distract you from the job in hand – whether that is driving to Glasgow on a rainy evening, or doing a single, dab-free run of Waterworld at the Golfie.

Where will it all end? The simple answer is that it won’t. Engineers gotta engineer, designers gotta design. And while I often share the ‘But there was nothing wrong with the old one!’ sentiments as we get another gear here, another USB charger there, you have to admit that modern mountain bikes generally just make it easier to get on with the experience of riding. While most of us will rarely touch the upper envelope of the bikes we’re riding, the fact that there are effectively no technical limiters on our riding leaves us free to ride the ride that we want to – whether that’s a chilled tour of the woods or a rocky, steppy trail at the limits of our abilities.

Hang on to that retro bike by all means, but make sure you ride it now and again to remind yourself that progress isn’t limited to bikes. It can apply to the rider too.