TESTED: Czar Street Trials 24

Words: Adam Macbeth    Photos: Tim Bardsley- Smtih

There was a time in mountain biking’s short history where there was no such thing as a trials bike. Not really. From the early days of the discipline, competitions were held based around two styles of bikes. Modified Trials saw riders on tiny, usually custom made bikes with twenty-inch wheels whereas the more popular Stock class was ridden on regular hardtails with no real changes other than the saddle being slammed as low as it could go, and maybe some brake tweaks to get as much grabbing power out of them as possible. It was a time in which mountain bikers would compete in downhill, cross-country and even trials all on the same bike. A lot of every day mountain bikers played around with and enjoyed riding trials.

As we’ve seen over the years, bikes have become more and more specialised and the trials bicycle is definitely no exception. The bikes that people are riding in World Cup level competitive trials barely resemble a bicycle at all anymore and if you are used to riding proper mountain bikes they actually feel disgusting to ride. It is fair to say that the fun and rewards of the trials bike were lost to the general mountain bike population for many years.

Then they sent us Danny MacAskill. 

The rise over the last couple of years of Danny Mac inspired street trials riding has seen a new generation of bikes enter the arena, which in many ways offer a throwback to the era of Stock trials. Bikes that can totally be ridden in a static, traditional trials way but that also lend themselves to messing around and acquiring skills in an extremely fun and very accessible way for the regular rider. Watching guys like MacAskill ride, it just looks fun right? Makes you want to get out and play around? Well let’s see if that’s actually how it plays out. 

FIRST IMPRESSIONS

Here, we look at Czar’s aptly named Street Trials. The Chinese brand, and their parent company Echo, have been making traditional competition style trials bikes for over fifteen years, but with the introduction of the Street Trials aim to hit a wider audience and remind people that a trials bike can be a tonne of fun, and might actually be good for your overall riding. 

The first thing to note about the Street Trials, is that it looks like a regular bike. Normal looking riser bar, the bottom bracket height doesn’t look ridiculous the way a modern trials bike tends to and it actually has a seat. Get up close though and there are some very trials bike details. The frame is constructed from heat-treated aluminium and there are gussets aplenty. The head tube and bottom bracket areas are heavily reinforced and Czar haven’t skimped on the welds around the dropouts and rear brake mount. Unlike the Stock bikes of old the Street Trial rolls on 24 inch wheels which gives an assumption of manoeuvrability but should still roll pretty nicely. They did need a little love out of the box though, being a bit low on tension to really deal with the kind of braking force they were going to be dealing with.

The Street Trials is also single speed specific with built in chain tensioning bolts forward of the dropout. These were a bit of a pain to set up initially as they have a 2.5mm allen key head and they’re not easy to reach. I was also a bit concerned about them clogging with dirt long term but this bike is designed for mainly street use so that may not be too big of a deal. The gear ratio out of the box is eighteen teeth up front on a crank mounted freewheel, with a fourteen tooth fixed cog out back. Trials riders have a habit of destroying freewheels from pedal kicking and it’s lot easier to switch one out on the crank than to rebuild a wheel if you trash a hub. 

A complete Street Trials from their Australian distributor comes with Echo’s in-house hydraulic disc brakes, and while reviews of that brake are great I chose to spec our test bike with Shimano Saint brakes on 180mm rotors. It is a system I have used for many years and knew I could trust from day one in order to get into it and test the bike hard without too much of a ‘getting to know each other’ period.

On The… street

Having recently spent a lot of time on my trail bike the Street Trials initially felt very comfortable and rolling around in the carpark warming up you could tell the bike was going to be fun. Regular sweep handlebars, very short chain stays and a relatively low bottom bracket give it the feel of a tiny playful version of a regular mountain bike and even warming up there was very little effort required to get one, or even both, wheels off the ground. As I said earlier, a proper competition trials bike basically feels like rubbish to most riders, especially with both wheels on the ground, but the bike gave none of this negative feedback at all and even put a smile on my face carving swoopy turns down the tarmac hill to meet our photographer, Tim. 

Yes, you can ride proper trials style moves on this bike, but I am not going to focus on that too much here other than to say it is very stable when stationary on the rear (or front) wheel, though taller riders may want to have the bike specced with a longer stem. If you were looking to learn some of those kinds of moves the Street Trials is confidence inspiring, and pretty effortless to get moving. The place that the Street Trials really excels for regular riders though is in learning some skills that will translate very well to your every day mountain biking. I have never ridden a bike, trials or otherwise, that was so much fun to just mess around on.

Manualling, bunny-hopping and pivoting around on the front wheel were all done with a lot less effort than required on your regular trail bike, but the feeling of that regular bike remains. The super short wheelbase makes for a tonne of room to move around on the bike and the stiffness of the frame means that rider input is immediately translated into movement. It is a tonne of fun, like serious laugh out loud fun and inspired even me, a veteran of the trials game, to try new things and attempt lines that I otherwise may have talked myself out of.

Do you find narrow, techy lines at the trails a bit nerve wracking? Rolling around on the Street Trials and honing those low speed, finer skills is likely a pretty good remedy for that and chances are there is a lot of stuff near your house that would make a great ‘gym.’

Our Take

This is a pretty cool, inexpensive little bike that takes trials back to where it used to be – an accessible discipline for all mountain bikers. Would I take it on an all day trials ride on rocks at the beach, no. Nor would I want to have to get anywhere in a hurry on it. However if you are only able to make it to the trails once a week but have an hour after work to just play around locally with some tech lines and get your riding fix, the Street Trials will reward you for it and I think the real strength of the bike is in the skills you will acquire that translate directly to riding better on the trail. 

Also, did I mention how much fun it is?