BMC SpeedFox 02 Two

BMC’s Speedfox has become more cunning with a ground-up revision and some neat tricks

- Alan Muldoon

Unless you’ve been living under a rock you’ll probably have noticed that trail bikes have been getting longer, lower and slacker for quite some  time now. On the whole, that shift in geometry and sizing has been a positive one, but there’s a limit to how far you can go in one direction before you upset the balance of a bike and need to look at what’s happening at the opposite end.

And that’s exactly what BMC has done. With the new Speedfox, the Swiss Bicycle Manufacturing Company bucks the trend for increasingly short chainstays, to produce a bike that climbs better while offering a more balanced, stable ride on the descents. At 445mm, the chainstays on the BMC split the difference between the extra long pioneering 29ers and the latest generation of big wheelers, desperately trying to mimic the ultra-short rear ends of 27.5in bikes.