Best Hardtail of the Year 2022 | Mountain Bike Rider

After what seems like a lifetime, we’re back on track with our Hardtail of the Year test. In the three years that have passed since our last hardtail bonanza a lot has changed. Covid put a spanner in the works of production, bike prices rocked as availability shrunk. And in the latest blow to consumer confidence, inflation is eating away at our spending power. Which makes our Hardtail of the Year test more important than ever before. And while we’d love to say that our 2022 test is the biggest and best to date, given the current climate, that would have been an impossible task. In fact, looking back we can’t believe just how good we had it. In 2018 we had 18 bikes in total, evenly split across three price points. Then we tweaked the format for 2019 to deliver a new sub £375 price point, with four separate categories in one massive test with 24 hardtails. But like so many things post Covid, we’ve had to adapt. As such, we’ve adopted the same format as our Trail Bike of the Year test, splitti