Pyga OneForty Pascoe - Review

We’ve had a great couple of months aboard the Pyga OneForty, a real South African stallion!

Pyga Industries is the brain child of Patrick Morewood, previously of Morewood bikes who has set out to create awesome trail bikes that will stand up to burly enduro races and big days out. The OneForty Pascoe is their current longest travel bike at 140mm, and is designed to tackle gravity enduro racing giving performance descending without compromising on climbing ability. Since our first look, UK distributors R53 Sport have announced that they will be sorting build kits for the range, including the Pascoe. Their build is pretty similar to what we’ve been riding – more on that later.

The OneForty frame features a floating shock, working on the same platform as the shorter travel OneTwenty. This has already proved itself to be a very capable system, keeping the suspension feeling great all the way through the stroke and allowing the air shock to do the business without any dramatic changes. By having a slightly falling leverage rate at the end of the travel this counters the progressive nature of air compressing to deliver a pretty linear feel. We will explore this a bit more with tame frame designer Tam from BTR later on.

The lines of the frame are smooth and elegant as we’ve come to expect from hydroformed aluminium with some tweaked shapes to offset the shock slightly and improve clearance around the cranks and chainring. All of the welds were neat and tidy, and the finish of the paint and graphics was great. The OneForty is bang tidy looking in #enduro yellow and certainly turns heads. The custom headtube badge and the decals on the top-tube give tribute to Ken Pascoe, a South African trail building legend. The cable and hose guides are there for brakes, front and rear mech and dropper post, ISCG05 mounts and a direct mount front mech mean you can build up the bike as you see fit f you don’t get the full build.

Up front the Rock Shox Pike gives a great ride and was a doddle to set-up, and paired well with the Monarch shock. Both ends of the suspension feature lockout/platform damping to switch on at the flick of a switch for climbing. To be honest, after the first ride I didn’t bother with them, the rear end isolated pedaling from the suspension action so well that I didn’t feel the need to use it. The back end delivers awesome grip on the climbs if the going gets rough, and smooth, efficient climbing when the going is less lumpy. On the descents, the back end feels superb, plush, supple and near bottomless in it’s travel. The Pike is similarly good, plush and with plenty of small bump sensitivity. We rode down a real mix of trails from rocky and flat out to loamy root and drift fests, and throughout the bike just felt composed. Our large test bike had a long cockpit at 627mm, but this felt great, especially at speed. The relatively short chainstays (430mm) mean you can hoof through the corners with relative ease.

Obviously the bike comes equipped with 275 wheels, as pretty much every bike of this ilk will now. Our test bike had Stans Rims on Hope hubs, a faultless combination. Our bike came decked out with XT drivetrain and brakes, again faultless. The full builds come with a SRAM drivetrain and brakes, again a good match for the bike – the S vs S debate will rage on forever, pick a drivetrain and be a d*ck about it! Our one, relatively minor, reservation about the builds available is the Geax tyres. While the compound and tread pattern were soft, grippy and pretty fast rolling, the sidewalls were very pliable meaning that if you cornered hard (as you should on this bike!) the tyre would roll and squirm on the rim. You could solve this by pumping them up a bit but at the expense of finer grip. There is almost certainly a “sweet spot” in tyre pressures for these and we had a good go at finding it, but never quite got there.

The cockpit featured on both builds is excellent, a short stem paired with some stiff carbon bars. Obviously a trail bike should come with a dropper post, the top end featuring the proven Reverb stealth while the lower spec features the simple mechanical ICE dropper. Bars are finished with the awesome Troy Lee ODI grips.

I guess the bottom line comes down to, should I buy this bike? If you are looking for a bike you can ride all day on everything from gruelling climbs to hammering descents, and maybe even chuck it on your shoulder for a bit of hikeabike, then this is the one for you. You now even have the choice of a full build or a DIY job. There are a few shops across the UK with demos available, well worth slinging a leg over.

The frame retails at £1799 with a Monarch shock.