LONGTERM RIDES

ROB’S TREK SLASH £4,050 (frame only)

For our tech-editor-in-chief, perhaps simpler is better

With Bike of the Year done and dusted, I’ve been back out riding the Slash regularly and loving it. Well, for the most part. There’s no denying how much fun and confidence I get from the bike, but it turned out that during my short hiatus, I’d forgotten how to tweak the settings of its auto-adjusting RockShox Flight Attendant suspension system.

On my first lengthy ride post-BOTY, I needed to tweak the compression damping. It took me some time, and the use of my phone and the SRAM AXS app, to get this done. Maybe it’s my haggard old brain struggling to retain information, but at that point, out in the wild, there was a bit of me that just wanted to twiddle a dial. That said, once I’d figured out how to do it, it took me a matter of seconds to adjust things, and me forgetting how to do it is largely down to how regularly I switch between bikes – something not everyone has to worry about.

Ahead of my next big outing, I was sure to charge all the batteries (four, if you include the AXS gears and dropper post). That evening, I was setting