Mountain bike trends are a funny thing. Spend any time in this world, and you’ll end up with well-earned whiplash trying to keep up what cuff-length socks the cool kids are wearing and what wheel size we’re all supposed to collectively deem outdated. Just a few years ago, 29-inch wheels were quickly pushed aside by a world of 27.5-inch bikes that inspired 2017’s great overuse of the word ‘flickable’. This year, the Mojo HD5 is one of just seven of them that made the Bible cut.

The much-anticipated successor to the HD4 may have stuck to its wheel-size roots, but the geometry and suspension saw significant rejiggering. As expected, the geometry was modernized to fit with today’s ‘longer, slacker, steeper’ ethos. The headtube was slackened to 64.2 degrees and paired with a reduced-off- set fork to maintain the stability of a slack head angle without having a front wheel that’s out in the next zip code. The seat angle got 2 degrees steeper, bringing it to 76 degrees, and the reach grew across the board, with the large size seeing a bump of almost 20 millimeters. But numbers are just numbers until you hit the dirt, until the punchy climbs are done and dusted, the berms have been railed and hairy sections successfully navigated with skill (though ‘sheer power of dumb luck’ is an acceptable descending technique as well).

[continued...]

View full post on bikemag.com