Evil's The Following is Uncommon—and Uncommonly Good
It's fitting that I became obsessed with a bike called The Following.
On paper, it was a recipe for 29er bliss: a beefy, full-carbon frame; low, slack geometry that could be made even more relaxed with an adjustable system; 120mm of rear-wheel travel. With each sentence I read, my fascination grew. 29ers have mostly been either steep-angled, short-travel XC race bikes or slack-angled bikes with 140mm of travel or more. I've always dreamed of something in between, with less travel and a more relaxed stance.
The Seattle-based Evil brand may be unfamiliar to some readers, but those who really know mountain biking will recognize the name of the founder, suspension guru Dave Weagle, of DW-Link and Split Pivot fame, who sold Evil to Kevin Walsh in 2008. After years of downhill focus, Evil launched two trail bikes: The Uprising and The Following.
The suspension is a basic, single-pivot design attached to Weagle's somewhat complex, patented Delta rocker link. As if straight out of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, "Delta" is an acronym for Dave's Extra Legitimate Travel Apparatus. Its signature feature: high and low "flip chips," which allow you to change the bottom-bracket height, head angle, and seat angle. An optional headset offers an additional degree of head-angle adjustment.
Given Evil's downhill roots, it's not surprising that The Following has a gravity-focused character. The frame comes with a custom-tuned RockShox Monarch RT3 Debonair shock, and I built my tester with a 130mm-travel Fox 36 fork, giving the bike a head angle of 66.8 degrees in the low chip setting. Because of this geometry, I expected it to be stable and perhaps a bit sluggish in terms of handling, but The Following was agile, easily switching tracks midcorner and cutting to the inside line. A day at Mammoth Mountain highlighted its cornering ability, where the bike railed around soft turns as it would on hardpack, drawing smooth arcs with little effort from me.
I had no problem keeping up with other riders of equal ability on bikes with up to 160mm of travel. Sure, there were situations—like when the trail got really chunky—in which more travel would have been better and faster, but I was more often surprised by what the bike could take than what it couldn't. The progressive ramp makes the suspension ultra-supple at the beginning of the travel for superb traction, but then it gets stiffer, holding up through the stroke. The bike rocketed out of banked corners and g-outs without sinking too far into its travel. And all that extra pop revived my love for catching air on Mammoth's jump trails.
The Following can climb, too—though more thanks to technical prowess than raw speed. I'd get to a stepped ledge that was spaced just right to hang up the front and rear wheels at the same time, think, there's no way I'll clean it, then go up and over like it was nothing. It also pedals well; I could keep the shock open all the time, to react to bumps and lend extra traction.
The seat angle gets as slack as 72.1 degrees in its low setting with a 130mm fork. With my relatively short thighs, this put me far enough behind the bottom bracket that I had to ride the nose of the saddle on steep climbs. But test riders with average leg-length proportions didn't have this issue, and I eventually found a great fit using the high chip setting, a 120mmtravel fork, and the one-degree slacker headset option to keep a 66.8-degree head angle.
It's silly, but I've held a little resentment for 27.5-inch-wheel bikes, not because I don't like riding them, but because the 27.5 craze slowed 29er progression so that the trail bike I always wanted never materialized. Until now. Even with my expectations so high, The Following delivered. It's proven to be one of the most compelling and fun trail bikes I've ridden, regardless of wheel size.
What You Need to Know
? 120mm-travel 29er trail bike
? Long, low, and slack geometry that's adjustable
? Water-bottle mount inside the front triangle
Price: $2,599 (frameset)
Weight: 6.6 lb. (L frameset)
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