First Look: Lapierre Spicy 516 - Long Termer

At the start of last week we took delivery of our latest long term test bike a Lapierre Spicy 516. We gave you a sneaky look over on the MoreDirt Instagram but just incase you didn't spot it first time round. Here's a more in depth first look.

We are big fans of the very apt white, red and blue paint job on the Lapierre which hails from the Dijon region of France.

The Lapierre Spicy was born and designed in conjunction with the king of enduro himself, Nico Vouilloz. The Spicy has been his bike of choice for the Enduro series and Megavalanche in recent years and in the short time we've had the Spicy in our possesion, we are starting to understand just why he rates it so highly.

The Easton Havoc bars certainly offer enough width for even the widest of shoulders!

The Spicy 516 sits bang smack in the middle of the range between the super pimp Carbon 916 and the slightly more basic Spicy 316. It features a pretty great spec as standard with Fox suspension front and rear, XT Shadow plus gearing, Race Face Turbine crankset, Rock Shox Reverb Stealth seatpost and the awesome Mavic Cross Trail UST Tubeless wheel set and all this still comes in at a cool £3099.99.

Now we certainly appreciate £3099.99 is a lot of money so you would want to be safe in the knowledge that the Spicy would perform whatever conditions you were to throw at it.

When riding the Spicy 516 one of the first things you notice is that slack 66 degree head angle. It makes the ride feel very forgiving and incredibly stable at high speeds on the downhills admittedly you pay the price on the uphills but how much fun and how assured this bike feels when the speeds increase makes up for it ten fold.

The 2x10 drivetrain on the 516 gives you more than enough gears for climbing and when combined with the awesome Reverb Stealth dropper post I have almost found the challenge of a steep incline enjoyable. The lack of a chain guide was something that took my eye when the bike first arrived but the Shimano XT shadow plus rear mech with clutch system has done a good job of keeping the chain in check so far!

We have some big plans in the pipeline for our Spicy long termer in the near future so look out for lots more coverage featuring this bike and our other Ibis long termer on MoreDirt.

Check out our update after 6 weeks onboard the Spicy and final review with video here!

Lapierre are distributed in the UK by Hotlines UK.