Pete heads south to Saalbach Hinterglem to get a ride on the new ebike from YT Industries, the all-new Decoy SN Core 4.
With a carbon frame, MX wheels, 160mm travel and a Fazua Ride 60 motor, there’s plenty to shout about the new YT Industries Decoy SN.
Photos by Ale di Lullo.
Key features:
- Fox 38 Factory GripX2 170mm fork
- Fox DHX2 Factory shock
- SRAM GX AXS Eagle T-type 12-speed drive
- Fazua Ride 60 motor
- Fazua Ride 60 430Wh battery
- SRAM Maven Silver brakes
- Crankbrothers Synthesis E-Bike Alloy rims on I9 1/1 hubs
- YT Postman dropper
- £8,499.00 RRP
- UK-YTIndustries.com
The Decoy SN is YT Industries’ latest offering, and is the result of the German brand aiming to make the best enduro bike they could. The end result of this quest was their new mid-power ebike, powered by a Fazua Ride 60 with a 430Wh battery.
Don’t think of this as a mid power, mid weight bike though, at over 20kg it’s not going to win any weight weenie contests as that simply wasn’t the end goal. What you have here is an enduro capable bike with suitable components with enough help to enjoy yourself between the descents.
160mm rear wheel travel is managed by YT’s V4L linkage rolling on MX wheels and a High Modulus carbon fibre frame holding it all together. A flip chip offers two positions, Regular and Low to alter head and seat tube angle as well as BB drop.
Three YT Decoy SN models will be available, the Core 4 seen here at £8,499.00, the Core 3 at £7,499.00 and the Core 2 at £6,499.00. All come with the same carbon fibre frame, motor an battery, cranks and tyres.
Geometry
The YT Decoy SN is available in S, M, L, XL and XXL.
Reach on the M is 455mm with a seat tube of 400mm. Head angle with the flip chip in Regular is 64.2 degrees with a seat tube angle of 78.4 degrees. Chainstays are 442mm across the sizes with the wheelbase on the M of 1263mm.
Opening moves
The range-topping YT Decoy SN Core 4 comes with Fox Factory dampers front and rear. A 170mm 38 GripX2 out front and a DHX2 out the back. Drive is courtesy of SRAM GX AXS Eagle T-type, chosen specifically because the battery sits inside the mech, rather than outside on the higher models. Brakes are SRAM’s new Maven Silver brakes. Wheels are a custom set of Crankbrothers Synthesis eBike Alloy rims on i9 1/1 hubs. The rear rim is a DH offering, the front an enduro. Tyres are Continental Kryptotal Enduro numbers. A Renthal 35mm cockpit, SDG saddle and YT’s own dropper rounds things out.
This would be my first outing on both the Fazua Ride 60 system, SRAM Mavens and the new Fox GripX2 but with plenty of riding on offer, there’d be plenty of opportunity to get to know them all over the course of the next few days. Thanks to the help of the YT team, setup was taken care of in all aspects, so we knew we had the ball park settings from the get-go.
As ever, suspension sag and damping sorted first, lever throw tweaked and off we went. We had a short spin up the road to the first lift and the first thing I noticed was that the Fazua motor applied the power in the same way I did, no delay, no jerky input, just a natural feel of the motor kicking in with no daft overrun.
Our opening lap was on Saalbach’s Panorama trail, one with plenty of berms and jumps and one that felt almost entirely alien as I simply don’t ride enough of this stuff. The high speed and commitment required to ride it fast would take until the end of the day to master.
Thankfully, we’d drop into the Leogang side of the hill for something a little sportier in the form of the hand-built Alte Schmiede trail. Hand cut, natural and wetter than a mermaid’s flip flop, this was very much my style and immediately I could sense what adjustments I needed to make to the bike. This was followed by the Antonius Trail that kept the natural feel going.
With a touch more High Speed Compression on the shock, a couple of clicks off the shock spring (Fox’s spring retainers click, quite handily), 5psi out of the fork plus a touch less low speed rebound. From there the bike was even happier charging through the slop, punctuated by what can only be described as the grippiest roots ever.
From there it was back to some more berms and jumps, and boy do they know how to build a berm in Austria. Unsurprisingly, trying to set up a bike to work well on this kind of trail and a muddy root-fest of a trail was a bit tricky but despite the bike feeling a bit firm for the duration, I never felt that it held me back. This might have had a little to do with the Renthal 35mm cockpit that is famously stiff.
I eventually got my eye in on the bike park berms and jumps, with the Decoy SN being a predictable machine railing corkscrew berms and popping off some rather steep lips like I had been doing it all my life. It was easy to forget that I was on an ebike when the riding was this good, only to easily be able to spin in between trails or lifts allowing me to concentrate on riding the thing.
Range, unsurprisingly, was excellent, me being the master of combined system weight. I would drop the motor into ‘River’ for the descents and ‘Rocket’ for the climbs, but even so, I still had two of five lights on the battery left after a full day of banging out the laps.
Despite the lack of suppleness, the Decoy SN continued to allow me to get ever faster as we tackled ever trickier trails whilst also letting me fully get my eye in on the faster berms and jumps too. By the end of the trip my hands were battered, and I’m sure a slightly flexier cockpit setup would improve matters greatly.
The Decoy SN had allowed me to crack on when faced with some soaking wet natural trails and let me ride bike park berms and jumps the way they were intended. No mean feat. A little more time with the dampers might have let me go even faster but it was a cracking couple of days in the Austrian Alps where I only ever went faster.
YT have, with the Decoy SN, taken their race-proven enduro ingredients, give them an update and added a touch of help with the Fazua Ride 60 motor to get you a very good tool for giving it the beans on the descents and to help you go back up for another.
