Ard Rock is one of the world’s biggest enduro events which takes place every year in Yorkshire Dales, UK. Combining an incredible race with a festival-like atmosphere and an expo area huge enough to rival any UK bike show, and with most of the UK’s brands in attendance and plenty racers bringing one-off or custom rigs with them, there’s plenty of unique, unusual and downright stunning bikes to spot.  Most of these beautiful bikes aren’t available in these exact set ups to the general public, but several can be bought exactly as shown, including the Dawley, Ra Bike and YT. Get ready to drool… How to get started in enduro racing Best hardtail mountain bikes: classic trail slayers Ra Bikes .12 North Yorkshire-based Ra Bike is the brainchild of Rafi Richardson, who also happens to be one of the key course builders and event organisers for the Ard Rock enduro itself. This .12 model is his latest handmade creation and with a stunning finish shows how far this small brand has come in the last few years. Entirely built in Rafi’s workshop from machined alloy hardware to manipulated butted steel tubes through to all welding, few steel frame builders tackle such complex link-driven designs. The brand’s latest model is the RA .12, which is an enduro machine with a wraparound suspension design driving a coil shock through 165mm of travel and designed around a 170mm RockShox Zeb fork. www.ra-bikes.com Ra Bike .12 headline statistics are a 64° head angle 78.5° seat angle, 30mm BB drop and 435mm chainstays. The latest model has a capped headtube gusset and uses a mixture or Reynolds butted steel tubing. Progressivity is tuneable via a tidy flip chip at the foot of the 205x65mm RockShox Super Deluxe Ultimate damper. New integrated fender keeps grit out of main pivot bearings. Tidy chainstay and dropouts use SRAM Universal Mech Hanger for maximum compatibility Machined in house, Ra Bikes’ complicated wraparound linkage is designed to work with both coil or air shocks. The design has a very progressive 3.1:1.9 leverage ratio in the stock configuration. Hope HB916 (show edition) This stunning Hope HB-916 was built up as a special show bike by the Lancashire brand. All the custom paintwork and specially etched parts were done in-house at Hope with the bike built around Öhlins suspension. The most obvious visual difference with the new HB-916 is a high pivot and associated chain idler mounted into the seat tube, but a multitude of harder-to-spot changes lurk all over. Longer reach numbers are paired with a 64-degree head angle that’s pretty slack to begin with and can also flip via an adjustable custom headset for a one-degree slacker set up.  The Öhlins shock is mounted horizontally in front of a refined and much steeper seat tower, suspended between the downtube and a freshly machined rocker link. The 916 is designed to work with either a coil or air shock as it has a ‘fairly linear progression’, and there’s also a neat … Continue reading Quirky and beautiful bikes from the Ard Rock Enduro