At a glance A nice-looking, durable bike with quality frame and components and remote-locking suspension in a wide range of frame sizes.
Tested by
Claire Maxted, tester for The Bike List
Performance
"GHOST knows what women want!" they claim, but do they really? The Miss 7000 Recon certainly looks nice, the white frame with light blue flecks works well together (and matched with my helmet, oh so important…) and if you like chunky frame tubing, then this is a great looking bike. But how does it perform?
I've been showing this aluminium hard tail off at Chicksands and on the local Midlands trails, through forest, country park and single track, and the thing I like best about the Miss 7000 is the remote front suspension lock out lever on the handlebars. This is great. It makes it very easy to switch from gliding along the road to hammering it over rough trails with 100mm travel on the Rock Shox Recon Silver forks absorbing the shocks well.
The quality, white-edged Schwalbe Smart Sam 2.25 tyres front and back look great and provide good tread for mucky tracks and forest trails. The back tyre did slip around on the muddier corners, so if you really want to lean into those bends you might want to invest in a knobblier option. The almost continuous centre tread is useful because it means that you can go faster for less effort on road sections and fire tracks.
The Shimano 505 hydraulic disc brakes work well in the wet and the dry so there were no issues around braking. Another component I liked was the new for this year 10-speed Shimano cassette which offered a great range of gears (11-34 teeth) for undulating local trails. I always find the left hand shifter hard to operate when going from the middle to the big chainring, so having 10 gears to choose from on the cassette made it easier to cope with surprise hills with the right hand shifter only.
All the bikes in Ghost's Miss range are designed with women in mind with shorter, angled top tubes for more comfort when you're standing astride it. The top tube is also reinforced with a gusset where it meets the seat tube so it should be really durable around this high stress area to last you many years of flinging it round the trails. As an average height (5'7'') woman I found the 40cm frame fine to ride with the saddle back as far as it was allowed. There are plenty of sizing options (34/40/44/48cm) frames to fit small and tall women so if you try before you buy or measure yourself precisely you should get a good fit.
For better handling on turns, I found that I wanted the handlebars to be a little wider. At 60cm in width they are good for squeezing through gaps in the traffic when you're road riding to the trail, but I would prefer a few more cm on each side for slightly more leverage and control round sharp bends and berms. As it was, I found this bike a little clunky and heavy feeling on the turns - I had to keep holding back rather than gliding smoothly round the bends.
Oddly, the Miss 7000 Recon also feels heavy when you pick it up to pass over gates etc. Ghost claim the bike weighs 12.5kg, but actually its weight is slightly heavier 12.78kg. It's only 330g more than the 12.45g Kona Kula Lisa, a very similar hardtail that I am currently testing, but I can feel it quite significantly when I ride it and pick it up.
For the £1050 price tag, The Ghost Miss 7000 Recon is a nice, durable bike with a good quality frame and components. The only things that let it down, for me, are its weight and clunky, heavy-feeling steering. The wide range of frame sizes are great for women, it rides okay and it's brilliantly easy to lock out the suspension remotely.
