Vitus is a direct-to-consumer brand that sells a wide variety of bicycles, from Road to Downhill, at some extremely attractive price points. We found it refreshing to see a sub £4,000 carbon-alloy enduro mountain bike offered with some top-level componentry, especially at a time when 15% price rises are not uncommon across the bike industry.
Just like its 290 counterpart, the Sommet 297 has two geometry configurations; the low position in which it is shipped delivers a 64-degree head angle coupled with a 76.5-degree seat tube angle and a bottom bracket drop of 12mm . The high-position, accessible via switching the orientation of the flip-chip at the lower shock mount, gives rise to increased ground clearance by raising the bottom bracket to a drop of just 6mm. Concomitantly, the head tube angle steepens to 64.
Only on the very steepest, punchiest sections of technical climbs did I feel the need to get out of the saddle to stop the front wandering. The Vitus Sommet 297 isn’t one of the better climbing enduro bikes I’ve tested. It does exhibit a tangible amount of squat under acceleration, making the bike feel a bit sluggish on long fire road climbs. Its Fox Float X2 Shock does, however, have a lock-out, or at least a threshold lever that massively increases the compression damping to give the bike a much-improved pedaling platform.
At 30% sag, I found the X2 shock was packing down, not able to recover fast enough from consecutive hits – even with the rebound damping set to fully open. To get faster rebound speeds, I added more air to the shock, bringing sag to around 27%. Here, the bike performed much better. Where my feet were getting blown off the pedals previously, they were now remaining happily in position, even when hauling down the faster, rubble-like sections of track.