Life as a technical editor for one of the largest cycling websites in the world is admittedly a dream gig but itâs not without its downsides (I know, I know â cry me a river). It sounds ridiculous from the outside but constantly riding different bikes does get old and just as my colleague Oli Woodman noted several months ago, I likewise longed to once again have a personal bike â one that I actually paid for and could just mindlessly ride without constantly having to take mental notes. Having sold my beloved Santa Cruz Blur TRc a few years ago, it was once again time to go shopping.
Iâve always preferred downhills to uphills but I also like to earn my turns so I wanted a do-it-all mountain bike that was light and efficient enough to climb on for hours on end but tough enough to truly attack rough descents. My list of requirements seemed straightforward enough, at least initially:
- 150-160mm of travel
- New-school geometry with a low bottom bracket, long front end, and a slack head tube angle
- A neutral rear suspension design that didnât require any goofy shock valving to pedal well. It also had to use a standard shock mounting system that would also allow me to test various rear shocks
- A frame that was stiff but also quite light. Iâm not particularly heavy and generally punch well below my weight class in terms of climbing ability so I wanted all the help I could get
- Room for a water bottle inside the main triangle. Thereâs far too much horse and cow poop on our local trails to make under-the-down tube mounting practical, plus I find that location generally sucky regardless
- Something semi-rare that I wasnât going to see everyday at local trailheads
After months of searching and plenty of candidates being eliminated for various reasons, I ultimately decided to take a leap of faith and went with a Lapierre, wholly sight unseen and without the benefit of any test ride whatsoever. My British colleagues have long praised Lapierreâs longer-travel mountain bikes and as the company only recently started selling on these shores, I knew I wouldnât see that many of them. The burlier Spicy model that I ultimately wanted unfortunately wasnât available but since the Zesty AM uses the same frame (just with a more weight-conscious component build), I plunked down the cash for a Zesty AM 927 and eagerly waited for the box to arrive.
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The 150mm-travel OST true four-bar rear end definitely ticked one of the boxes
Since the stock Zesty AM wasnât quite what I was after, the bike as it stands today is ultimately quite different than how it was delivered. All Iâve kept from the original build are the SRAM XX1 transmission and Avid XO Trail disc brakes (which, I should mention, have been utterly trouble-free). The original 150mm-travel Fox 32 Float was quickly replaced with a far superior 160mm-travel RockShox Pike RCT3. And even though Iâm a self-professed tech nerd, I still prefer to make decisions for myself so the fancy RockShox e:i auto-adjusting electronic rear shock system (along with all of its associated wiring, sensors, and battery) was jettisoned for a RockShox Monarch Plus.
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