"adult cruiser of the Apocalypse" - Susie review

[Brian Turner]

For those interested, Russ put up his review of a Susie. It's a pretty good one:

https://youtu.be/dhReJy0pzXw

-Brian

[Paul Clifton]

Lots of good stuff in this review. I'm happy to finally know that the head tube angle is 69 degrees. That seems about right, and having someone corroborate the ride qualities I've been experiencing with my Gus:

1. The handling is twitchy (for a Riv) but it's really easy to change how the bike handles by moving my hands forward and backward on the bars. Having so much real estate on the bars because of the long top tube --> lots of bar sweep is seriously awesome and makes the bike so much fun in so many conditions.

2. The very upright riding position engages the quads a lot more and the glutes a lot less. I first noticed this on my baby bike, and it's definitely carried over to the Gus. Like Russ, I'd like to get my glutes more engaged, so I'm still fooling with my handlebar height and stem length, but I think it's just part of the ride. I'm pretty sure my quads are overdeveloped relative to my glutes to begin with, so I'll be adding in more squats and bridges to my cross training plan to keep everything in balance. I out sprinted my fiend on his drop bar gravel bike anyway, so I don't think it affects "performance" enough to matter on a fun day out, but it could impact endurance over a long ride, maybe - only way to know is try.

The medium has an additional bottle cage mount, but I'd still like some more three pack mounts speckled around the frame.

What a freaking awesome bike. I'm so stoked about mine, but I don't know about Russ' claim that it'll be a forerunner of what we'll see with the upcoming ATB trend. I kind of think that no matter what happens with ATBs, it'll always be an outlier - no one else is ever gonna spec chainstays like that ...

Paul in AR