Marin’s Quad-Link Trail 140 bikes were among our favourites of 2008 when they first appeared: “big bike handling without the bigness,” we said of the Wolf Ridge. The 2009 range kept the frame design but rejigged spec and the names, so all the Trail 140 bikes were Attack Trails. The naming convention is carried over into 2010, but the bikes have all been redesigned with 150mm of travel (they’re now called the Trail 150 series) and slightly less industrial looks.

We rode the Attack Trail 6.8. The 6.8 will be £2,499 in the UK, although the listed spec for the UK bike is a bit different to the one we rode. The demo bike was a Shimano SLX/XT transmission mix, in the UK it’ll be Truvativ cranks, SRAM X-9 and so on. The suspension bits are the same, though, with a 150mm RockShox Revelation up front and a RockShox Monarch air shock in the back.

The Trail 140 bikes were notable for their slack front/steep rear geometry when such a thing was a bit of a rarity. With a whisker more travel, the Trail 150s go further. Our trailside measurements were reassuringly in agreement with Marin’s published figures, with a 66° head angle and 73.5° seat angle. Chuck in a middling top tube and lowish (by Marin standards) BB height and combine with one of the best back ends in the business and you’ve got a bike that’s a real blast to ride.

That back end’s been tweaked a bit for 2010. Obviously it’s now delivering an extra 10mm of travel, but also it’s been modified to work better with Truvativ’s Hammerschmidt two-speed crank gearbox. With Hammerschmidt’s chain run being as if for a granny ring regardless of which ratio you’re using, Marin decided to optimise the axle path and chain growth for a smaller chainring. The clever bit is that doing so hasn’t hampered the Attack Trail’s performance in a triple-ring configuration at all – in fact, we think we prefer it. It’s got a little more get-up-and-go in the middle and outer rings, making it feel a bit more eager under power and encouraging the attacking of steep uphill bits. The best approach on the old bike was to spin away and let the suspension do the work – effective, but uninvolving.

It’s still got that “pocket DH bike” feeling on the way back down, with the laid-back front end encouraging you to work the bars and the short cockpit making it easy to do so. It’s hilarious fun. And it’s pretty light, too. At least, we’re fairly sure it is – being consummate professionals, we weighed it and then forgot to write the number down. The Bikemagic synapses want to say 13.6kg (a hair under 30lb) but they’ve been wrong before – as soon as we get hold of a UK spec bike we’ll try again…

More at www.marin.co.uk.