Trek Roscoe 6 is a plus bike with 120mm travel fork, a bolt through axle, and an aluminium frame that wouldn’t look out of place on a £1,000 hardtail.

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Our bike test editor Alan Muldoon described this bike as putting a cat amongst the pigeons. It’s obvious why. You’d think because of the highlights the rest of the spec would suffer or the price would go up, but neither of those things are true. The Roscoe is just as well dressed as anything else on test and is also one of the cheapest bikes here.

We really like the fact that the Roscoe 6 has a relatively short stem, a wide 760mm handlebars and a saddle with a bit of padding. The thing none of those help the ride quality because you can take any liberties with this bike, like taking a rough line or squaring off a corner. It actually feels pretty nervous and we think a big reason for that is the Kenda rubber – the Havok tyres lack any sort of edge grip.

The Rocoe 6 is also one of the shortest bikes on test (it’s actually 40mm shorter than the Saracen Zenith Pro) so we felt a little perched on it, and not being able to get the saddle down probably compounds this issue.

There’s a lot to like about the Roscoe but it really needs tyres with more bite if it’s to fly the coop.