Scor 2030 Review

It's not the size that matters

I've learned damned well to keep my mouth shut about the capabilities of bikes I have not yet ridden on home turf. I have been pleasantly surprised many times and the categories are blurred, smudged, partied-out lines. The Scor 2030 came across our radar a while ago at Crankworx Whistler. Cam and I were invited to scare ourselves on a short travel bike in the Whistler Bike Park. You can peek at the first look HERE. Fast forward to late fall / early winter and the baby blue (Ice Baby), GX build, size Medium, 2030 arrived in a box from the Swiss Company.

The Build

The center of the build is a 120mm rear travel, dual-link driven and surprisingly stout, Enduro Category 4 certified frame. 120mm of sporty suspension is controlled by a 47.5mm stroke 185mm trunnion RockShox Deluxe Ultimate RCT shock. The shock goes through a tunnel in the seat tube. This means on a size medium you can insert 230mms of post into the frame. In comparison the Canyon Spectral I recently reviewed has 265mm and my Orbea Rallon 350mm insertion. The medium 2030 comes with a 160mm BikeYoke Devine. Size S 125mm | M 160mm | M/L, L, XL 185mm travel Bike Yoke Devines respectively. A very unfortunate side effect of the rather aesthetically pleasing shock through seatpost design, is the limitation of the droppers one can use. I found the 160mm drop to be insufficient for how low slung the top tube is. We'll talk about this further down the line.

I really like the Scor's numbers. The 457mm reach on the medium with a 610mm stack works really well for this heavenly body. The head tube angle can be adjusted +-1° between 64.5-65.5 and was left in the slacker of the two for the entire test period. My next article may very well be; All bikes should come with 64° HA and Tim Coleman would surely disagree, but for the riding I do, 64 this the magical number. The rear center is 429mm. This number is the same for sizes S, M and M/L while the L is 432mm and XL is 434mm. These short rear centres keep the 2030 feeling snappy.

The cockpit and the controls are familiar in all aspects. A Carbon 800mm bar with 20mm rise and a 31.8 clamp is held in place securely by a 35mm Burgtec Enduro MK3 stem. The Scor's in house bar is understated and has a nice glossy finish. I cut mine down to 780mm, as I do on all my rides but I had a hard time tightening the brake levers onto them. I never tighten levers down completely. Being a Shimano brake lover on my personal bikes, I have come to expect damage to my lever blades during a crash. If I don't choke the bars down with the brake levers, crashing forces will allow them to spin before the lever blade breaks. The Code RSCs with a matchmaker to accommodate the bikeyoke dropper lever required a lot more than 5Nm of force to stop them from rotating on the bars. This is partly due to the surface finish of the bars and partly due to the cable routing for the dropper creating extra friction and requiring more force at the lever end to actuate. Every time I pushed the dropper lever, they would rotate around the bar.

There is tube in tube routing throughout the frame for cable and hoses. As the dropper cable enters from the right side of the headtube, it travels down the frame and exits at a sharp angle from the right side of the shock tunnel. It then crosses to the left side underneath the shock externally and follows the left side of the tunnel at a sharp angle to proceed upwards toward the bottom of the dropper. I am confused by this decision to route the housing this way as the corrosion inside the steel housing makes the quality of dropper actuation degrade quickly. I would much prefer a routing where the housing stays on the same side of the frame it enters from at the headtube. It feels like it would simplify the road it takes and reduce friction. There is the rear shock to navigate around, but there seems to be enough room to do so. I don't understand this decision, but I am also not an engineer unlike all the other people on the internet. I am mostly frustrated with the dropper on the Scor because I wanted a bigger drop from it. The frustrations compound when you are dealing with a piece of equipment you use often on a ride. I started using it less on the Scor.

The Rockshox Pike Ultimate at 140mm travel, Charger 3 damper and Buttercups is a wicked piece of equipment. It works and it works well.

For my test period, I settled on;

• 80psi
• HSC 0
• LSC 0
• Rebound 10 clicks out

Deluxe Ultimate RCT

• 165psi for 30% sag
• LSC -1
• Rebound 4 clicks out

The Scor 2030 can use a longer shock if you'd like it to. The 5mm increase in shock stroke gives you 10mm more in rear wheel travel for 130mm in total. I did not have a trunnion shock with a 52.5mm stroke in hand to test the bike in longer travel mode but I also never felt much need for more.

80% of the ride

If you measure your rides in time around here, there is a significant discrepancy between the time spent climbing and descending. The climbs are civilized enough on the North Shore but start venturing into the Sea 2 Sky corridor and ascents get steeper quickly. Even the common IMBY climb on Eagle Mountain can test the willpower of a fairly fit individual. Luckily, Scor has a great seated pedalling position. In the Slack setting, the little bike has a 77.6-degree seat tube angle that puts you in a great upright stance for all day pedalling comfort. The bike is designed for this stuff. It is a bike for the people who have all the time in the world to extend the weekend ride to 7-8 hours and explore all the trails in the vicinity. Being winter, I used the 2030 in an opposite way. Whenever I had a very small window of opportunity to get out between weather systems and pound out an hour of power ride I would pick the spritely Scor over the bigger bikes in the stable. The Scor also became the official night ride bike with an Outbound Light mount permanently fixed to the bars.

The urgency the 2030 pedals with is exhilarating. With the rather simplistic and utilitarian GX cable drivetrain taking on the shifting duties, there is a 30t chainring upfront. Out of the box, the 2030 comes with a Maxxis Dissector Dual Compound EXO tire in the front and a Maxxis Rekon Dual Compound EXO tire in the back. Step on the pedals, and this fast rolling, lightweight setup takes off like a whippet. There is no winding up or turbo lag to be felt, just direct power to the ground on demand. That is if your riding surface allows for this combination rubber compound and casing. While the Dissector / Rekon tire combo is not out of place for certain times of the year for certain rides, it is not the best combination for the kind of trails the little blue rocketship wants to be ridden on.

For my general dental safety and peace of mind, I switched things up a little on the 2030. The Dissector became the rear tire with a Tannus Insert and up front, I got a Maxxis DHF MaxxTerra in EXO first and a Maxxgrip in DD later on for other testing purposes. (you'll have to wait a short while for that article) 20psi for the front and 24psi for the rear pressures was set to keep settings in line with the rest of my bikes. With more appropriate tires for the suspension performance and geometry at hand, The 2030 came alive.

The DT Swiss XM 1700 wheels with their straight pull spokes and 350 hubs, the Scor rolls in near silence. The only sound is the air punching the insides of my lungs. But the 2030 really wants me to pedal hard. I am significantly less tired at the top of the climbs than any other bike at my disposal. This thing is fun. But this kind of uphill prowess can't be good for the downs right? Wrong.

While most of the North Shore is still slow and janky with crazy tech moves that kill the flow ever meter, there are some newer builds and rebuilds that allow for some wind to pass through your neck. The builders of the Dark and the janitors of the jank have altered their style to allow for lower angled, higher speed trails that are super fun to ride solo, any day of the week. You don't need to scare yourself to have fun anymore and I appreciate that. The Scor jumps to service at the sight of these high speed blues and dark blues / light blacks. The highly progressive nature of the Scor allows for a supple top 30% of travel and a quick ramp up for the rest of the tiny shock stroke. While the O-ring on the shock shows me that I have used all that is available to me after each ride, my legs never feel a harsh bottom out from the frame.

The suspension feels calm and composed all throught the travel. Running faster rebound also helps with the recovery and making the 2030 feel extremely playful. Too much play does come at a price of stability at high speeds so pick your poison accordingly. A plush feeling bike that can plow and erase all the trail chatter or a bouncy ride that can double or triple everything in sight. The Tannus insert I have inside the Dissector in the back helps with the last little bit of the travel and calms the bike down. I no longer default to tire inserts thanks to the Continental DH casing tires I have been using, but the natural speed of Scor helps with the increased rolling resistance with the insert in the tire. With the air volume inside the tire taken up by the Tannus, the rolling resistance increases compared to the tire at the same air pressures with no inserts.

Scor designed the 2030 to have either 120 or 130mms of travel from the rear wheel with the switch of a shock stroke. The stock shock is short stroked internally to provide 120mm of travel. You can take the Deluxe Ultimate to your service center and get it extended to 52.5mm to give you 130mm travel. If this is the road you want to embark on, I would also take the Pike to 150mm (may need to move to a Lyrik for this ) to really open things up on this bike. This brings me to the intentions of the 2030. I did not find the 120mm travel to be a weak point of the frame. Adding more millimetres may help with the overall composure of the bike but if it comes at the expense of how excited it is to hammer the pedals, I am not for it. This is the main reason I reach for the Scor. It is the bike that contributed to weening me off the dependencies of the E-bike. The easier it is to get the bike to the top, the more likely I am to take it along for the ride. There are a few bikes in the category the Scor lives in. The Rocky Mountain Element, Pivot Trail 429, Yeti SB120, Trek Top Fuel , Yeti SB135. But how do they compare?

Our resident rock expert Cooper Quinn is fast on a bicycle, especially the Rocky Mountain Element. He doesn't mind a tough uphill battle and definitely can open up the pipes for the downs. He is arguably faster on the downs than I am and while he is on his RM Element, I was able to stay on his back wheel a little easier than I anticipated aboard the Scor 2030. The Element has the closest geometry numbers on paper to the Scor among all its peers but it's built a little more for the XC crowd that occasionally likes to get rowdy. A complete GX build Element will top the scale around 28lbs while the Score 2030 is 32lbs as it sits on my floor with a DHF and Dissector.

The Pivot and the Yeti SB120 are close but neither have the slack sub 65° head tube angles to easily deal with the steeps of the North Shore trails you will eventually end up on. The SB135 I reviewed feels the most similar to the Scor in how burly it feels. Yeti has more travel front and the rear but with 27'5 wheels on either end has a different aura overall, however, It is amazing how similar the overall riding experience is on top of both bikes.

It is almost impossible to categorize the 2030 other than it's a trail bike made for riding trails. From how well it pedals to how comfortably it descends, there is no place it would feel out of place. It even does a formidable job riding the trails at the Whistler Bike Park.

If short travel and even shorter chainstay bikes are your thing, there is a place for the Scor 2030 to exist in your world. Leave the stock tires on and tour across the Praries if you want. Toss a burly set of grippy tires and race a local enduro event if you need to. I got conned into signing up for the Whistler Back Forty race this year and I am hoping the Scor will accompany me to the race for a more pleasant experience. It is an XC race in Whistler which will present heart exploding climbs and proper sketchy descents that you can bring a big bike on. I think the capable 2030 will be a good bike for this and will not be the weakest link in the equation for a healthy finish for this 40+ year-old mountain biker.

I will have to figure out better ways to route or free up the friction in the dropper housing but there is very little else I would change. The bearings are still running smooth and none of the bolts required attention in the past few months of hard riding.

If I was forced to own one bike for whatever reason, the Scor 2030 with a couple of sets of wheels with different tires would be right on top of the list. It is a stiff yet compliant short travel bike that can go anywhere and not be an introvert. Slack, short travel bikes may be the solution to problems created by the lack of ride time and access to big terrain. It is exhilarating having a blast on the blue trails while not being out gunned on the darker shades.

You can get the Scor locally and exercise your 3-year Warranty through the dealer. While the prices are not what I would call a bargain, the unique ride quality on offer will be worth the price to some discerning riders.

GX build coming in at 6,499 EUR / 9,550 CAD / 7,000 USD surely will be cheaper if your local shop has one in stock.

Scor 2030