A Freeriders Trail Bike？ ｜ Devinci Troy Review - 2025 Pinkbike Field Test

Is it silver or... Oh, yes! There we go! See, that was a test. One sec, hold it. Wait, where is it? Hold it, Tom. It's cause I hunted and got it so hard last night. Alright, we're here at Whistler for the field test. Testing a bunch of trail bikes. And up next, we've got the DaVinci Troy. It's a made in Canada aluminum frame, mixed wheel bike. You can run it 29 inch if you'd like, thanks to a little flip chip. It has 150 millimeters of rear travel, 160 millimeter fork. It's even got some in-frame storage. As for how much it weighs, check it in at 34 pounds, 12 ounces. DaVinci says this bike has some white hot Canadian speed, which that's a pretty good ad copy. They also say that it is a... What do they say? They say our Quiver Killer has a new set of instincts. Which, I don't like that as much. We're trying to get rid of the term Quiver Killer in almost all the bikes we have here on test. They keep saying it, so stop saying Quiver Killer. But in any case, we're going to get to the full review. We'll kick things off with some initial ride impressions. Bike is definitely very alive, yet stable. Yet unstable. Oh, my chain's off! Single pivot. It was actually going pretty good. Yeah, definitely a bit of weird steering going on with this. Pretty slack, very short out back. Or at least it feels like it. So, that were your initial impressions of how the Troy rode. Now, we need... It's a brown paper bag. Delivered in BC, it could quite frankly be anything. What have we got? So, before we get to the review, we're going to reflect on the three words that Matt gave after his first run. This is nice. Tinny. Backseat strong. Tinny? Yeah. What do you mean? Tinny? You could just get the sense of, you know, the bike being aluminum. There was a little bit of rattle from the compartment, like the storage door, and maybe some of the cables. So, just like a little rattle. See, rattling doesn't bother me so much. The word that would concern me, as someone looking to buy a bike, any time the phrase backseat comes up. What did you mean by that? Well, there's just like a lot of weight over the back wheel, depending on how you set up the shock. And it's a small rear wheel, so it did kind of give that sense of like the front wheel being out there, and sort of like the you know, the POW surfboard style bike, where like it's, you know, slack and sits back pretty far. But we kind of came around to that further by setting up the shock a little different. Let's get into some climbing impressions. So, it's single pivot, it's metal, it's mixed wheeled. All of that surely points to a bike that climbs badly, right? Did it? I wouldn't say it's a terrible climber. Like, there's decent ground clearance. You know, we talked about the 27.5 versus 29 options on this bike, and the other bikes where, you know, you get more traction with the bigger wheel, but I think for like, you know, more of a burly build on a bike that caters to riding downhill quickly, it still climbs fairly well. This bike isn't going to set the world alight on climbs. It's also the second heaviest on test, but unlike the Stumpjumper, which is full 29, this is mixed wheeled. Does either the weight or any of the characteristics of this bike slow it down compared to some of the other sportier bikes on test, would you say? I mean, compared to the Stumpjumper, I found it maybe had a tiny bit less traction, maybe the wheel and the way the suspension operated, but in some ways it was almost more effective because the bike was higher, and I found it's hitting the cranks a lot, climbing on the Stumpjumper, and this one felt a little more raised and just more easier to negotiate through tech stuff, and then, you know, in terms of travel and wheel size, it's comparable to the Bronson, but it felt a little bit more alive climbing as well, weight aside and all that stuff, so how did you find the weight played into that? I think, honestly, the weight wasn't really a primary concern to me. I know there's so many different facts to how we ride bikes, I wasn't taken aback by how much it weighed. What was interesting that you said about the dynamic ride height, I found really interesting because that's something that we'll talk about in descending as well, but for me, I found that it sat quite high in its stock setup, the suspension does feel, for whatever reason, quite linear, at least to me, and that's something that kind of actually had an effect on the climbing position as well, I just felt very high up in the travel, which actually made me feel kind of perched atop of the bike, both front and back. Let's talk about how this bike descends. Descending on the Troy, does it descend how you'd expect it to? Once you get the shock set up how you want to, yes, but this is a bike that, like I rode before I saw the geometry chart, and it felt kind of there's something in its stock setup something that made it feel kind of higher and more wayward on the front than the geometry chart would suggest. Would you agree with that? Yeah, I think, you know, similar to the Sentinel, there is that high-low chip you can play with, and it's a little more dependent on wheel size, that's what it's mainly for, but it is there as an option to make it slacker in the lower mode. And like the Sentinel as well, I felt like the bar height really came in to play there, and if you rode a really low front end, you did get that sense that your feet were too high, and so balancing the bar height and the sag and the ride position, like the flip chip position, it takes a little more to fine-tune and just decide okay, this is good, I feel safe, the bike's settled, and then you did a lot with the shock. Yeah, you touched on it really well there. On paper, when we addressed it earlier on, like an aluminium, mixed-wheel, single-pivot bike, you think this is going to be quite easy to just hop on, and it feels like all the things you know. However, I would say that, to my mind, it did take a degree of experimentation with the shock. Very linear feeling. And I just felt, I suppose, that what it did to and where it held your weight, it just made it feel like it was riding on tiptoes in a stock setting. I just felt so high up on the bike. Tracking was still quite good, but it was only when I really started enjoying the bike was when I made it more progressive. It had three of those sort of spaces around the upper eyelet of the shock, I suppose, around the body. You could take one more there, put one in, and honestly it made a noticeable amount of difference. How did you find the shock setup? I mean, like I said, you can set it up in a couple different ways with the volume spacers and tuning the air spring to have different amounts of sag. So, drawing back to the Sentinel, which I found this bike was most comparable to, it took a little bit, you know, there's sort of two different setups you could get. So, tuning the air spring to make it firmer for the bike park helped resist those bottom outs when you're compressing through turns or jumps. And then, if you're riding more techy, softer terrain, especially when it's steeper, you might want to lower the spring rate and go with more volume spacers so that you have that tiny bit, like, sensitivity, but then deeper in the travel you have the bottom out resistance. Number three. Does this feel like a more compliant bike than others? For me, yes. In what sense? Compliant, like, suspension action or frame stiffness? For me, it came to I felt that there was more lateral flex, not in a bad way, in quite like a comfortable, easy handling way. If you want to carve turns on a bike, for me, I felt that you could really get into them and what that means, I think when you have a frame that is so stiff that it kind of refuses to budge, it can be quite hard to really translate all your energy and your body through the frame to get it like sort of carving out and through a turn. When you have something that's just a bit flexier, I think it can actually make it easier to ride, in my mind. I would say that this is one of, probably is the most flexy frame on test. Not in a bad way, though. I thought it's compliant. What I want from a bike was kind of confident, inspiring, easy to get through turns and yeah, I would like to. Would you pick up on that? I mean, not to the same degree. I feel like the flex that I notice the most is more like through rough terrain, like across chatter, like off-camera roots and rocks. Sometimes you get bikes that are softer like the Sentinel. I found that the bottom bracket kind of swayed a lot side to side through the terrain and then the Troy actually was I found it fairly, not like stiff I just thought it was a good medium and then the Bronson might be on the stiffer side of that. But you definitely pick up on that where you load up those big sweeping bike park turns and you can see everything kind of moving and I guess the good thing about having a nice degree of flex there is that it kind of slows down where your body is in the turn, right? Yes, exactly. So you can kind of feel like, okay, I'm getting grip I'm hitting the pocket of the corner and then it throws you back out in a nice way whereas if it's too stiff it could just jar and you lose traction right away. And similarly, if it's too flexy, it feels like it kind of loads you up like an archery bow and just spings you back, which is no good either but I thought the DaVinci had a really nice torsion leap, a nice compliant level and it was also a comfortable bike to ride. So then is this a trail bike or a mini freeride bike? To me, I think it's a good all-round trail bike. I think if you wanted... Trail bike is such a funny term. If you wanted to go more trail-y, you could go to its 29-inch short travel version which is a complicated way to do things because the swing the flip chip gives isn't actually that much to offset it. You know, you look at the Ibis and the length's about that long with the Troy it's a bit shorter so it means that you put a 29-inch wheel in there and it's going to have an effect on other key geometry dimensions. Not only the obvious ones like head tube and seat tube angle but also like effective top tube and reach. And so, is it a really good trail bike? I think so. Is it as a trail as it could be? But I think this is what a lot of people want riding like, you know, pedal access, blue trails, single blacks. This bike's an easy you know, easy good bike for most people. What do you think? Yeah, I would say it's like the free riders XC bike. You know, we talk about like the downhillers XC bike. This one's maybe a little bit more poised for like pedaling the top, hitting more technical moves and having a bit more fun on the trail but not necessarily like as get up and go as like something like the Spectral. But do you think it's got enough support towards the end stroke to be doing big compressions? I didn't really have an issue with it. Like, I felt like the ramp up was decent once we got that extra volume spacer in there and I upped the pressure for some of those moves. But I think this bike would be a really good candidate for that hydraulic bottom out. Yep, definitely. I think it would really add a different flavour not only in terms of, yeah, the end stroke but what the effective changes you can make are. So how the bike feels the rest of the time as well. Especially when we talked about early on but running out of travel on the brakes with fast compressions. I felt like it just was, you know, begging and pleading at the end of the stroke as it was kind of being nibbled away at. Okay, so we just went through some ride characteristics. We're going to throw it to Mike in the garage for what this bike's like to live with. We'll start with adjustments. Basically, just this one right here lets you swap the rear wheel size. Super easy to access and on a whole, the bike is kind of really nicely basic. I mean that in a good way. All the hardware, easy to access. There's no tiny little nooks and crannies. If you need to replace bearings, swap a shock, it's not going to take a ton of effort. We did notice the amount of chain slap is pretty loud. This chain stay protection is not very effective. Getting some rough stuff, it hits pretty hard. I'd put something softer. That material is just a little bit harder. So softer chain slap protection would take care of that. Other things, we would have liked to see a longer travel dropper post. This bike, size large, has a 180. We're kind of long legged folks here riding these bikes, so something longer would be nice. Not the end of the world. It's pretty good, but longer would be better. Other things to mention. Talk about the shock. We ended up sticking in another volume spacer just to get some more bottom out resistance. That's pretty easy to do. Again, I mentioned it's easy to take the shock off if you need to. You can also do that with the shock on. So still easy to live with, but you might need to do a little tinkering to get that suspension fully dialed. And also, in-frame storage on this bike. It has it, which is cool. Especially because it's an aluminum frame. Fairly small. This opening is kind of tiny. Kind of a little bit... Yeah, just a little narrow opening. We did get a little bit of noise. Something was rattling in there. But overall, nice that it has in-frame storage, but it's not the most roomy. You can't stick your whole full puffy down jacket or anything like that in there. Overall, livability index, I'd put this high on the scale. Just nice, easy frame to work on. No strange proprietary parts. Overall, home mechanics would be really happy with this thing. Plus bonus points for it being made in Canada. Now we're going to head back inside and see what they have to say about the bike's pros and cons, as well as who's it for. So that was Pinkbike's Mike Kazimer in the garage. Let's bring it to our pros and cons. Matt, the pros. Pros. This is a very capable trail bike. Definitely on the descending focused end of that spectrum. And then the frame, you know, made in Canada. Lifetime warranty. Aluminum. Lots of people are asking for that these days. And then the third one would be, this is like a comfortable bike to ride. You know, it's plush. It's not overly harsh. We talked about the flex characteristics. So yeah. What can you say that's negative about this? In some ways, when it comes to just the noise that comes out of the frame of the bike, it doesn't feel like the most refined. You can put that down the chain slap or the kind of the swap box door. It's definitely not a swap box. That's someone else. But the frame storage, it's a bit heavy. And also you might find that suspension begins to feel overwhelmed on fast repeated hits, especially under braking. So when it comes to who is this bike for? What's the perfect candidate for the Troy? Definitely free riders. You know, somebody who's wanting to hit, you know, bigger moves but you've got to pedal too. It's not like a lightweight get up and go sort of all mountain machine like the Spectral. Would you say that's fair? I would say that's fair. I mean, I think bikes like the Troy really depend on what your definition of trail biking is. If it is you know, basically you want a lighter version of enduro bike with a lot of the same things that make an enduro bike capable. I think this is a really good bet, albeit in like a sort of sportier package. If you want something that is going to feel perfectly at home on ribbons and single track I wouldn't say this is quite it. So I would say to your point, like absolutely it's got the geometry that makes it feel really capable. And if you're someone that wants to pedal, get about the place, but also put a bike to its paces you could do a lot worse than the Troy. So, that is our review on the DaVinci. Now, thank you very much for watching. We actually put the bikes to these paces for the last couple of weeks in Whistler. And don't forget to kind of catch up on our behind the scenes videos as we show what rigorous professionals we are doing endless laps of Whistler and getting headaches from eating too much ice cream. Thanks for watching and we'll catch you next time.