Lately I’ve been riding this 1999 GT XCR 1000, and I’ve been having a lot of fun:
And of course part of the fun is that it’s a full-suspension bike, and therefore a novelty to me, as I tend to avoid that sort of thing. Still, fun is fun, and riding an old full-suspension bike I sometimes can’t help wondering if I’d have even more fun on a new full-suspension bike.
But then I remember the bike that compelled me to get rid of my other mountain bikes in the first place:
By the way, fittingly, Jeff Jones started out at GT, and while they eventually figured out how to put an iDrive in a full-suspension bike to make it ride somewhat normally, he went on to figure out how to make a bicycle that does everything a full-suspension bike can do yet doesn’t need suspension at all.
I hadn’t ridden the Jones in a little while, but from the moment the wheels touched dirt I felt like I was back home:
The GT is, as I say, fun. It’s nimble and it’s plush. But the Jones…
It’s just a better bike than the GT. It doesn’t coddle you, nor does it egg you on; instead it encourages you and reassures you in that way someone does when they truly have your best interests at heart. It’s like a grandmother’s chicken soup, a father’s firm and guiding hand, and a mother’s comforting bosom all in one. Sure, it’s not all that exciting aesthetically, but it does look great next to that totem pole:
I don’t know why there was a quarter on it, but maybe someone was looking for a coin slot:
Meanwhile, everyone’s trying to figure out this whole 32-inch wheel thing, because supposedly they’re faster:
At the same time, Jan Heine maintains size doesn’t matter (we all tell ourselves that) and that it’s tire volume that makes a bike “roll over stuff better:”
The truth is, nobody knows for sure.
But what if you took a 29-inch wheel and put really wide tires on it?
Seems to me it would have the same effective diameter as the supposedly faster 32-inch wheel while also rolling over obstacles in the way Jan Heine describes.
And what if, instead of making a generic gravel bike or cross-country mountain bike chassis fit around it by resorting to stems with erectile dysfunction and other strange workarounds, you designed a really versatile frame from scratch?
Something tells me a bike like that would work really well.