With an excellent four sizes in the range the GT Aggressor Sport should suit pretty much every rider’s size, lanky old me included.

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But GT seems to have clocked it a little on the small size and the Large I tested felt very small indeed compared with the Calibre Two Cubed. GT has also resorted to an overly long stem to add size to the bike rather than building it into the size of the front triangle, which is a better approach to optimising your control and position. And speaking of control points, the saddle unfortunately wouldn’t go high enough for me, reaching its minimum insertion point a few inches shy.

So the Aggressor puts you too much over the nose of the bike, something that does the suspension fork no favours at all. It’s probably the poorest fork in this test and does a bad job keeping your front wheel tracking the trail. This makes the whole of the bike feel overly harsh and I repeatedly rattled the chain off on the descents. To top it all off, the Aggressor has an alarming habit of shifting gears when you really crank hard going into a piece of singletrack.

It’s not all bad news for the Aggressor though, the WTB Transition tyres are excellent and match up well with the decent disc brakes letting you put enough torque in to get stopped with just one finger braking, something none of the other cable actuated disc brake bikes could muster. All in though, GT has sadly made the worst bike here, it has a pretty frame but it needs a serious overhaul to compete with the new bikes on test.