Flow originally tested the BH Lynx 6 8.9 some 6 months ago. Back then we had some questions and ideas about the bike. Now, 6 months later with many hours on the trails, what do we think? How is it going and what have we both changed and noticed in the longer term?
There is no confusion about what this bike is designed to do. The Lynx 6 is optimised for stability and control on descents. A 66.5 degree is the slackest we’ve seen in the all mountain class to this point but this DH inspired geometry left us wondering why the bike came with a 660mm bar, 110mm stem and single ply tyres??
While it such a spec may be intended to address the bike’s weaknesses (climbing) and keep the weight down, we found that all it did was compromise its strengths (descending). Thankfully the shimano wheelset is tubeless ready, so after a couple of rides with a what we’d call a “confusing” cockpit position and a few flat tyres we upgraded to some tubeless rubber, knocked 40mm out of the stem and bumped the bar up to 740 by jamming some old broom handle in each end (just kidding – we changed the bar). We also adding a remote for the KS dropper post. This added 550g to the bike bringing it to a portly 14.85kg (XL size, remember) but this stallion was now unbridled and ready to be let loose.
BH’s interpretation of the split pivot design has a floating mount system drives the shock from both ends so we were a bit unsure how to set the suspension initially. The instructions recommend more sag than ususal so we went with 40% for the first little while relying on the CTD pedalling platform to provide efficiency when we were turning the pedals. However, due to the slack geometry we often found ourselves steering the bike through the rear wheel, more like you would a DH bike and this rearward weight shift caused the Lynx to sit too deep into its travel for our liking. Subsequently reducing the sag to 30% means the bike now performs much better on the rough singltrack/firetrail mix that we are used to.
Overall, the slack head angle definitely makes the Lynx handle slightly slower on the tight single track. To compensate for this, we ran the fork in the 5 inch setting thanks to our old mate TALAS for all singletrack work and only wound it out on when barking down big-dog descents.
Holy handlebar Batman! One thing you may notice about the BH from the pictures is that two remotes, separate shifters and levers make for a handlebar setup that is as busy as Pitt St mall on Chrismas eve.
While we are proponents of having control over the rear suspension and seatpost at the flick of a switch, in the near future we’ll be throwing a single ring on there (we haven’t been using the granny anyway) to get rid of one shifter and moving to an Shimano integrate iSpec setup a little further down the track to bring in all in line with the recommendations of our in house feng shui experts.
Now we have the setup issues surrounding the suspension, tyres and cockpit sorted and have also adjusted to the handling characteristics of the bike we have to say is loads of fun to ride. As a testament to its descending ability we have even racked up a Strava KOM down Copperhead at Mt Buller as well as bunch of top tens from descents in both Bright and Tarthra. At the end of the day, the Lynx 6 can be jumped, drifted, whipped and runched all the way to the base, and you are left with nothing but a smile on your face and a bike that is hungry for more.