Part One...

To begin with I'm looking at the 2017 Marin Hawk Hill as an out of the box, $1500 (USD)/ $1900 (CDN), full suspension mountain bike. Thanks to some assistance from Marin's Chris Holmes and Matthew Cipes I'll also be following up shortly with an editorial piece about min-maxing component spec; getting the maximum on-trail performance from the minimum cash outlay.

Without pushing the bike out of its price point I am going to nitpick Marin about a few details I think they should change but at the end of any ride, I really like this bike. Enough so that, not to give the ending away, I've asked Marin to hang on to it as an excellent, neutral, smile-inducing platform to test other price-point components. Yes, it's that good.

For more info on the spec of the bike, check out Dave's first impressions here...