Well, the prototype Trice Micro and I have now done quite a few km together, so it's probably time for another report...

I remember the first time I saw a recumbent trike-an old-style Trice, in my case. "That looks low," I said to myself. "I wonder what it's like to ride." In due course I found out, and the resulting grin almost permanently rearranged my facial muscles. Riders on conventional bikes would ask me whether I felt vulnerable on such a "low" machine, and I would say no, and grin the grin. Sometimes, as I twiddled a tiny gear up some piffling hill, I wondered about the extra weight of the trike I was hauling about. Sometimes, as a rider in a full tuck on an upright kept pace with me downhill, I wondered whether a more reclined seat might mean more speed.

Then, thanks to Rob Hague, I encountered the Trice XL. This seemed very low indeed, and the seat was much more reclined. My facial muscles underwent further rearrangement. There was a new note of concern from riders of conventional machines: Being that close to the tarmac was really risking life and limb, surely. I said no, and grinned an even broader grin. Uphills were mysteriously flatter, and riders in a full tuck were now having to pedal hard to have any chance of keeping up as I plummeted down the other side. But the XL was still a bit heavy compared to an upright bike, or Ian Humphries' GLR, and I wondered whether an even more reclined riding position might yield benefits.

Enter the Micro. As a friend observed, if it was any lower it would be under the tarmac. The seat is currently pretty reclined at under 30 degrees from horizontal, but can be adjusted to be even more laid back.. Unlike all the ICE Trice to date, the Micro has a hardshell seat. And it's light: Comparably equipped, even in prototype form, about 10 lb lighter than an XL. I know people who ride conventional bikes that weigh more.

Riding a machine this low requires mental adjustments. With your line of sight at such low altitude, parallax means that holes in the road appear to be mere slits. And in some circumstances it's harder to read the line of the road ahead. Fortunately the Micro's roadholding and handling are so secure that this isn't so much a problem as a guarantee of entertainment: Swerves-R-Us.

Though the Micro is very narrow, it's so low that I rarely feel the need to lean on bends, even as a precautionary measure. I've found it to track straight and true on high-speed descents, with just enough oversteer to make life entertaining. At the limit of adhesion the Micro seems to drift rather than tending to lift an inside wheel, though this may be partly down to the fact that I've been riding mostly on wet roads. When I haven't been riding through floods, that is. (I'm almost sure I'm beginning to develop webbed fingers and toes, and wonder whether the Micro should be reclassified as a human-powered boat.) Steering is sufficiently steady at low speeds to allow me to ride hands-off in order to put on my cap when it starts raining and take it off again when it stops raining two hours later. On a "good" day.

The Hope XC hydraulic discs are wonderful, though, as a card-carrying trikie, I naturally try to avoid using them whenever possible. Braking is single-sided, with each lever controlling one brake. Modulation and lever feel on the brakes are excellent. Hard one-handed braking produces a very small amount of brake steer, which is easily controlled with one hand on the bars and the other scratching your ear. There's not enough brake steer to use it to steer with, in other words. If you come on all Incredible Hulk with the brakes on a wet road, the trike tends to skid onwards rather than pirouette on its chainset. It was interesting (heh heh heh) on a recent ride to zoom down a steep, wet, bendy, unlit, rural, leaf-strewn descent near Wells, with a T junction at the bottom. A car soon overtook my companion on his upright, but clearly thought better of trying to get past the Micro. There was no problem in halting at the T. It took my friend a mile or more to catch up...

There is one quirk with the Hope discs-you need to take up slack in the levers occasionally. This is done by rotating a disc at the base of the brake lever, and can be easily done on the move.

In the interests of optimising hand clearance on full lock, the brake levers on the Micro squint inwards rather than pointing straight ahead. This feels slightly odd for the first couple of miles, then you forget all about it.

At first I pined for the usual Trice parking brake on the Micro (it's missing in the interests of saving weight). But I've found that a 30cm Velcro cable tie makes a very practical substitute: I wind it round a brake lever when parking.

It's probably worth saying a bit about the seat on the Micro, which is straight out of the X Files. It has an uncanny ability to disappear. When you just sit on the trike you're rather aware of the heavily sculpted shape of the seat, but once you're under way you forget all about it. The original foam seat pad was very sweaty, but the latest version (open cell foam inside a casing made of traditional Trice mesh fabric) represents a vast improvement while also locating the rider securely. The additional cushioning is also welcome. I had no quibbles about seat comfort after a recent long weekend that involved a 230 km ride, a day off, and a 170 km ride. While I haven't been able to try the new seat pad in warm weather, my impression so far is that ventilation and long-distance comfort are surprisingly close to those of the ICE mesh seat. There's a height-adjustable headrest which should be compatible with helmet-wearing.

The seat also seems to make an appreciable contribution to the Micro's climbing abilities. Not only can you brace yourself very firmly against the seat back on the hills, you can also "honk" to flatten minor climbs by wedging your back against the seat so your buttocks are off the seat base. The Micro climbs pretty well, losing significantly less ground to upright bikes even than an XL. Last weekend I found myself following an unladen MTB onto a steady local hill (it climbs a little over 100m in a couple of km, with only a couple of brief sections of 10 percent gradient). The MTB rider held out for 300m, then became a dwindling dot in my rear-view mirror. For what it's worth, I didn't feel I was going all that well that morning, so this was more to the Micro's credit than mine.

There's no question that the seat and cockpit of the Micro are designed for the slimmer rider. If you're too broad in the beam you'll limit the turning circle.

Despite the hardshell seat and hardtail rear end of the Micro, as currently configured, I've found the ride comfort to be fine over long distances. Overall comfort is significantly better than on my old '97 Trice, even with its mesh seat (and I managed to "put up with" the '97 Trice for 1,400km in 100 hours). In large measure I think this is a tribute to the resilient qualities of the T-45 tubing from which the frame of the Micro is built. I have a Micro rear end with a Cane Creek shock absorber in the garage, but, from my point of view, there seems to be little incentive to fit the suspension rear end since ride and handling of the unsuspended trike seem fine. Although it would aid foldability, if that's an issue.

When it first came into my hands, the proto-Micro was wearing non-Kevlar Brompton tyres. These rolled very well, but proved susceptible to p*nct*res on wet, debris-strewn rural lanes. and also had slight traction problems on very steep, wet climbs. Good summer tyres, I think, though even in summer I'd opt for the Kevlar version of the Bromptons, given the nature of alleged roads in rural parts of the UK these days. The Micro is now shod in Schwalbe Marathons, which seem to be a good choice for winter. They have reflective sidewalls, grip well on wet roads, and thumb their nose at the P*nct*re Fairy.

After some experimentation and much consultation with the guys at ICE, I now have the Micro's gearing set up with 56- and 34-tooth chainwheels, a 12-27 9-speed block, plus a Mountain Drive Type II (1:1 plus 1:1.65 overdrive). This provides an extremely user-friendly system. With the MD in direct drive (to minimise losses) and the chain on the big ring I have gears from 33 inches to 74 inches available merely by shifting the rear mech. Thanks to the small wheels, jumps between gears are small, less than 6 inches. So 95 percent of the time all I need to do is click the right-hand Gripshift to get the gear I require (after all, at a fairly conservative spinning-along cadence of 90 rpm, 74 inches translates into 32 kph; at a grunting-uphill cadence of 60 rpm, 33 inches means 9.5 kph. Sorry about the mix of SI and imperial units-I find gear inches allow me to visualise the effort of pedalling more clearly than a development expressed in metres). If I'm going up a steep hill, I can drop to the small chainring, which gives me a low of 20 inches and five gears smaller than 33 inches. If I want to pedal downhill, big chainring plus MD high range gives me six gears bigger than 74 inches, with a maximum of 122 inches. I can forget all about the small chainring/high range combination, because that merely duplicates big chainring/low range. This is a big plus, because forgetting all about things (eg, the day of the week, the year, my own name, etc) is a talent I tend to develop over the course of long rides.

The Mountain Drive has bedded in and loosened up with use. I can detect no additional drag in low range compared with a conventional bottom bracket, though there is a small, intentional degree of "slop" in the plane of rotation to permit the gears to engage. With the chain off, if you spin the cranks backwards with the MD in high range, there is slightly more resistance than with a conventional bottom bracket, but this is not noticeable on the road (in low range the MD spins just like a conventional bottom bracket). In principle I tend to mistrust non-derailleur gearing systems, but the Mountain Drive has won me over.

More or less the same goes for the Gripshift changers on the Micro. They don't have the fail-safe friction mode of bar-end shifters, and their feel can sometimes be less positive, but they are very convenient indeed and so far have never missed a change, even if they have been in a balky mood. I haven't had to adjust them yet.

General drivetrain refinement is very good, although, because of the additional pulley, the transmission is less silkily silent than on the XL. In extreme gears there's sometimes a slight sussuration from the underseat pulley.

Ah yes, while the letter S is on our minds: Speed. My considered opinion is that the Micro has lots of it. It's not slowed unduly by climbs (I keep waiting in vain for the numbers on the computer to drop to the values I'm accustomed to), it gobbles up downhills, and on the flat, well, it was a trivial task to keep up with a group of upright bikes propelled by a 70 kph tailwind. In typical trike fashion, though, the Micro is sensitive to poor road surfaces. For instance, on a "shake and bake" section of road I had to work moderately hard to stay with a group travelling at 32 kph-plus. When the surface changed to smooth tarmac I had to freewheel and brake to avoid vanishing into the distance. (I was being sociable...)

I've had no problems so far in negotiating speed bumps, sleeping policemen, speed cushions, ferry ramps, or road irregularities despite the lowness of the Micro. Nothing has grounded yet.

The compactness of the Micro, helped by a friendly train guard, allowed the trike to be carried in an unoccupied wheelchair space on a Southwest Trains service (I generally shun Southwest Trains when travelling with a trike, since they have a single small bike compartment-with inward-opening door-that requires machines to be parked vertically in a cramped rack). It's easy to carry the Micro up and down station stairs.

On several occasions I've encountered oncoming traffic on single-track roads on the Micro and have been able to sail past without breaking rhythm since the trike is barely wider than an upright bike. Even so, drivers clearly perceive it as wider than a bike, and give me a wide berth. The Micro is surprisingly OK in dense urban traffic. Standard rules of engagement apply: Assume that anyone you haven't established eye contact with hasn't seen you and is homicidally inclined.

The Micro is a prototype, so naturally I've been anticipating a few problems. But there haven't really been any. Here's the comprehensive list so far: 1) The dynamo bracket on the left kingpost tends to swivel through an arc of about 10 degrees, and makes it difficult to tighten the kingpost headset properly (it's being redesigned); 2) The radically cut-down Tubus rear rack won't take my 3-year-old Ortlieb Front-Roller panniers (it's being redesigned); 3) There is no item 3.

To put the character of the Micro in a nutshell, it's a very pushy trike. You pop out to buy a newspaper, and the Micro whispers in your ear: "Come on, point me at the horizon and go." You potter along, and it prods you in the ribs and says: "Come on, you can ride faster than this."

It's quite a machine. I want one...

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