Dialled MX20R Test ride:
I chilled out all day and then headed up top the track for 19:15 and met my friend and swapped over the frames as planned.
I then showed him my new toy and let him have a ride around the car park as training was still going on at the track! He loved it and said he will buy it if I ever sell it which was a good sign 🙂
As the training was finishing a group of scouts arrived so we put the gates on hold until they left at about 20:15! I rode the MX20R around the track a bit and I was amazed how I instantly felt at home on it (although its not really surprising as I have had 2 of them before and I regretted selling them both!) I was amazed at how much smoother the track felt and how much better my Manuals were! On about my 5th lap I did a full speed 1st straight and did the cleanest and fasted manual I have ever done on the second jump which is normally too long for me to manual cleanly on the cruiser but I slightly over manualed it on the MX20R.
Once the scouts left we got on the gate and I instantly felt at home on the gate too. The bike felt fast and easy to gate on and I was about the same speed if not a little faster out of the gate on it compared to my cruiser even though my cruiser has an onyx rear hub which makes gating a lot better! I was also able to balance better on the gate while looking at the lights than I am on the cruiser too! I really love the way that the bike rides and was really surprised how good the rear hub was. The gearing felt a tad low and I will swap for a 44×16 at some point and I think that I need to lower the bars a little but other than that the bike feels ready to race! The only other thing that I noticed was that the rear wheel feels like it moves when I snap, I put this down to the bike only having a chain tensioner on the drive side so I will add some forward chain tensioners to the bike as I have some in my spares box! I also noticed that the cranks were too long for me as my knee pain was back again after just a couple of laps! I plan to put the 170mm DXR cranks off of my cruiser onto the 20″ so when I do that I will move away from the 32×12 gearing that is on there at the moment and move to the 44×16 that will be the same gearing as the 36×16 I want to move to on the cruiser.
I have a feeling that racing will be shut down again soon as the Covid numbers keep rising all the time so I think I will take a break from the cruiser and ride exclusively 20″ until next season!
As you can probably see from the picture to the right, the MX24R frame could do with stripping and re-spraying anyway so I may as well get it done before I build it up then I can rebuild the cruiser with new bits ready for next season! I am thinking that I may get one of the sets of profile elite hubs that I have on my cruisers rebuilt on 20″ rims to use over the winter as they are way better suited to the British weather than onyx.
I am planning to get the rear dropouts changed on the Curtis over the winter anyway and the onyx rear wheel that I have at the moment will go straight on to it. I then plan to get a set of Onyx Ultra hubs built up and I will most likely get a 24″ front wheel built up and a 20″ rear wheel so that both bikes will have onyx hubs to race on and Profile elites to train on! I am planning to use the MX24R to train on and then keep the Curtis for Gates sessions and racing!
I may however only ride and race the Dialled bikes next year and let my friend’s son ride my Curtis again next year as he is killing it on the Curtis and I am riding really badly still! I will see how the MX24R rides once it is built up but I think it is enough of a bike for my level of riding at the moment!