Speaker 1: Mountain bike technology is developed
at a frankly astonishing rate. Each year new
products and suspension designs seemingly
popup from nowhere, or do they? If you take
a look at pro racers' bikes, that is where
you're going to start seeing the new mountain
bike tech emerging. Sometimes at races you'll
see this stuff shrouded in mystery, other
times you can see it hiding in plain sight.
If you want to be seeing what's coming next
in the world of mountain bike tech, you've
got to be looking at the bikes of the world's
fastest racers.
In this video, we're going to check out some
of the coolest techs we've seen emerge in
the last few years, from the race scene all
the way through to the shops, where you can
buy this stuff.
[music]
Speaker 1: Firstly, we're going to jump in
and we're going to look at the SRAM AXS system.
That's right, that is their wireless shifting
system, electronic and wireless, the first
one in the mountain bike scene. Seems like
witchcraft, it's absolutely crazy on paper
when you talk about this stuff. SRAM has a
program called BlackBox, they use it with
their transmissions, they use it with their
brakes and of course, they use it with the
RockShox suspension units, the forks at the
front and the shox at the rear. If you see
the BlackBox decals on any professional racers
products, you know that that is a prototype
and it's in work, work in progress and it
may well see production down the line.
We've seen the rumors about some wireless
shifting stuff coming from SRAM and you kind
of figured it was going to happen sooner or
later mountain biking, given what was going
on in the road world with the red equipment.
The first time I actually got to see it in
the flesh was at the Stellenbosch world cup
in 2018. It's in South Africa, first round
of the XCO World Cup, we found out that he
had a set on his bike, so we were desperate
to get up to him and have a look.
I snapped some of these pictures as you can
see of him in practice, we were allowed to
shoot the race and we were allowed to shoot
in practice. Things are a little bit different
now, but I managed to get these pictures.
We could desperately try to see what was on
his bike but nothing and every time we got
close to him, he disappeared. Finally, we
did catch up with Nino and his bike, just
as he was going into the SCOTT mechanic's
tent.
He basically took the shifter off, so we couldn't
see it and he showed us the bike. He wouldn't
answer any question about it, he would just
look at us with a little rye smile at the
corner of his mouth and he told us that we
were not allowed under any circumstances to
touch it. I filmed a short piece on it, in
fact, you can see some of the footage on screen.
If you want to see a link to that video it's
underneath this video. Of course, not being
able to touch it, you just want to touch it
more, don't you? We had a good look at it
at the time it was bearing the BlackBox decal,
in fact, you can see that right on screen
right now, it was super interesting.
What a way to launch a product, having the
number one racer, Nino Schurter, with that
product, which is yet to be proven at the
opening round of the world cup. All eyes were
on Nino in the race. It was one of the best
races I've ever witnessed, in fact, it was
the best race I've seen in the flesh, but
the race was all about Sam Gaze versus Nino
Schurter. Sam basically got the lead into
the arena with Nino and he picked him on the
sprint finish. In that sprint finish, speculation
says Nino actually had a failure on his gears
but that's not what I believe happened.
Firstly, there was no way that Nino was to
beat him anyway because Sam got into the arena
before him and he's a strong rider, so he
was controlling when that sprint was going
to happen and Nino basically was along for
the ride. If he could match it, he might have
got close but we'll never know now. What I
actually think happened was as he came around
that final turn, in fact, there's a series
of images here that I shot, I was here and
I didn't hear any gears skipping at all.
What I think happened was as he was over the
front of his bike, giving it all of that characteristic
Nino Schurter power, basically his back wheel
looked like it skipped momentarily on a small
bit of debris on the ground, it could be a
rock or something, this is the shot. Look
at his left foot, it's clipped out and his
back wheel is actually off the ground. I think
that he hit that and basically just threw
him off momentarily as he was under power
and just pulled his foot out the pedal. Either
way, he didn't win the race and it's really
annoying from his point of view, I'm sure,
but Sam, what a worthy winner because it was
an incredible race.
However, this was the start and this meant
SRAM AXS was here to stay. At the time, we
just knew it as the BlackBox Eagle, I think
we referred to it as. The next time we got
to see it was at another XCO world cup, this
time in Nové Mesto. This was incredible because
we went to see Yannick and the SCOTT team
again and he greeted us this time. This was
great, he goes, "Here's the bike, you can
see everything. I'm not going to answer any
questions this time, though, because I don't
know a lot of the stuff that you're going
to want to know, but here's the bike, just
please don't touch."
Never in my life have I wanted to play with
something so much. I wanted to go through
the gears and give it a try, but myself and
Dan, the cameraman, we were really respectful,
we did our jobs, we just looked at it, we
took all the images and the photos and we
delivered the bike back and they were really
thankful for that and that was good because
then SRAM came to see us when we got back
to the UK and they showed us a full pre-production
set and I got to try it out finally and it's
astonishing. I was blown away and still am
blown away by the performance of AXS and at
some point, I definitely want a set on my
bike or at least to spend some good time on
it because I think it's incredible and it
most definitely is the future of shifting
for races, but that's just one example of
a great product that we saw pre-production
being used by the best of the best racers
to refine it and make sure it works before
it sees production.
[music]
Speaker 1: Okay, next up is another shifting
based one, but this time not from one of the
big manufacturers like Shimano or SRAM. We’re
going to talk about TRP and Aaron Gwin. When
Aaron Gwin started the YT mob, there's a lot
of speculation about his interesting choice
of sponsors and the fact that there was a
lack of sponsor as far as transmission goes.
There was no SRAM in sight and there was no
Shimano in sight. So when he was spotted,
an early downhill race with this weird looking
shifter, something clearly in prototype formation,
there was a lot of speculation on the brand
it could be. We heard box components reference,
we heard micro shift reference and also E13,
after all, E13 was one of his sponsors on
the YT mob and they were making a downhill
cassette, so it was logical, right?
Well, it wasn't them. It was actually TRP,
his brake sponsor who he helped develop an
astonishing downhill break with and he was
going to do it again with the downhill shifter
and a derailleur. The really interesting thing
about this is it does have something very
different to all other derailleurs on the
market. Yes, it has a clutch design on it,
has a ratcheting clutch, in fact, you can
hear the noise of the clutch if I just move
this one now.
Very distinctive and is very, very powerful,
which is exactly what you want on a downward
bike, but something about Aaron Gwin that
I didn't realize until I was told by the TRP
technicians is, apparently he hates noise
on bikes to the degree that sometimes he's
raced and ridden using earplugs so he's just
locked out from all of that noise, so he can
just focus on the job at hand.
One of the things he wanted was the derailleur
to be completely silent and for no chain [unintelligible
00:07:23] to be present on his race bike.
The way they got there was quite interesting.
The B-screw, if I just hold this derailleur
up, for example, where the derailleur mounts
onto the bike, here you have the B-screw.
This adjusts the height of your jockey or
the guide wheels in relation to the cassette,
but once it's adjusted, it doesn't actually
serve a purpose after that and the derailleur
can actually pivot backwards and forwards
on that point but there's actually no need
for that.
With the TRP technicians and Aaron Gwin 's
race mechanic, John hall, they invented this,
which actually locks this part of the derailleur
known as the B-knuckle. It locks it, so you
make the adjustment, you lock it and the upper
part of the derailleur cannot move at all.
That in combination with a clutch derailleur
that's immensely strong means a completely
silent bike.
That is really quite cool. You also might
notice that the one in my hand is actually
a 12-speed trail derailleur. It's much bigger
than the downhill ones and hooks up with their
shifter. It goes to show that you can get
some trail stuff that's going to suit all
of us, comes from downhill race development.
Again, looking to the races for the development
that you're going to start to see filtering
down to what you can buy in the public, doesn't
necessarily mean you're only going to be able
to buy a downhill product just because a racer
is using it, but they will always be developing
it.
You'll find the same happens with suspension.
You'll see a lot of technology from downhill
suspension that's taken through into trail
bikes and of course into cross-country bikes,
but hey, TRP, awesome stuff and awesome bit
of development there from Aaron Gwin.
[music]
Speaker 1: Okay, next up, is about a set of
carbon fiber wheels. This is a particularly
cool one because we're going to talk about
the Zipp Three Zero Moto wheels. Zipp, in
case you don't know, are really famous in
the road world and in the tri-world, essentially
for making aerodynamic products, in particular,
they're famous for their dimpled profile rims.
They've got a slightly dimpled texture even
on the rim itself. Imagine like a golf ball
texture. It's more aerodynamic because of
the way the air sticks to it and enables it
to pass through without disturbing the air.
Incredible technology, but when Jerome Clementz
and a few other racers on the SRAM portfolio
running SRAM, well, RockShox forks and shocks
and SRAM transmissions and brakes, we've seen
them using carbon wheels. Everyone kind of
thought, "That's going to be the new SRAM
enduro wheel or perhaps even a downhill wheel.
Neil actually spotted the wheels under Jerome
Clementz at the Andes Pacifico race and he
was pretty sure that they were SRAM because
of the colors on the wheels, they were basically
black but there's hints of red about them,
they fitted perfectly into that, but not so.
A bit about the construction of these wheels
that makes them so special, they have two
things that really you've got to take into
account. It's the single-skin design of the
rim, which comes directly from motocross where
they build a big, heavy-duty, single-skin
rim. They don't need to make it lightweight,
because you've got motors to power other things.
In mountain bikes and road bikes, you tend
to have a twin-skin rim, so it's a hollow
form, basically. It gives it rigidity, yet
you can use thinner material to make them
nice and light. If you're going to run a single-skin
rim, it's going to end up being very heavy
and this is where carbon-fiber comes in.
They've taken the concept from a motocross
bike and they're using the carbon-fiber technology,
the Zipper experts, and they've made a super
lightweight rim. You can get carbon rims that
are actually too stiff, and the result of
that is A, they don't grip as well because
they can actually ping off things rather than
conforming slightly and absorbing some impacts,
and the second effect is they can be really
uncomfortable and transmit too much shock
through to your hands. The really cool thing
about the zip wheels here is the fact that
they have something called ankle flex engineered
into them.
If you think about walking on a section of
rough terrain, your ankles will naturally
conform to the terrain, therefore, you're
not going to slip or rebound off stuff, you
would just naturally move along. It's exactly
the same concept on these rims. In fact, I
made a video with Blake with these exact wheels.
If you want to see that, it's going to be
in the description underneath this one. If
you don't know about these wheels, you should
watch it. It's really good. You can see Blake
on a motocross bike as well. This is another
cool example of how you're seeing stuff being
tested at the most extreme races where there's
not exactly a big presence of media.
They're there, under watchful eyes, of course.
There you go, all the way through to production.
Very cool stuff. Next up, I want to talk about
the Santa Cruz V10, 29-inch wheel race bike.
This is a really cool story, because of the
fact that the 29-inch wheels, they're not
exactly new. 29-inch wheels have been around
pretty much since the beginning of mountain
biking. It's just there wasn't a good source
for tires and there wasn't the right source
for rims and various other factors stopped
them ultimately being one of the sizes that
we might have seen the whole time through
mountain biking.
Instead, we used 26-inch from the start because
it was readily available. It might have been
the wrong move, but we'll never know. Now,
Greg Minnaar, you could argue the fact that
he was riding a bike far too small for most
of his career. It's taken him up until 2016
when he started to write a double XL frame
on 27.5-inch wheels, and he really started
to get back into his stride again. You think
of a guy who's been racing an awful long time
compared to some of the youngsters out there,
and he's getting faster still. A correlation
is the fact that bikes are getting bigger
and longer and Greg Minnaar's getting faster.
The logical choice was for Santa Cruz to pursue
this and look into the 29-inch wheel thing.
Bear in mind that this had come up in early
2000s and disappeared. It came up again around
2011,2012, and one of the bikes that did that
was Norco Shinobi, which I’ve made a video
on. You can see in the link underneath this
one. I give a bit of history about the 29-inch
wheel in that as well. Then, of course, it
started to come in again in around 2016, 2017.
Santa Cruz team got themselves some early
Maxxis sample tires they call the envy rims,
they got the Fox 49 Fork, they had new back
ends made up, new linkages to cope with the
length of the back end to make sure the shocks
aren't going to get overworked. They basically
ran them on existing 27.5-inch front ends
to do some prototype testing. Lucas Shaw,
Loris Vergier and Greg Minnaar were testing
in various locations over the winter, including
[unintelligible 00:13:28] They all found the
bikes were universally faster and they weren't
bad like they thought they were going to be.
They all started thinking, "Actually, there
is something in this." They decided at that
point to commit to it.
They became the first team to turn up at the
first World Cup in Lourdes in France in 2017
with 3 29-inch wheel bikes at three races.
They'd fully committed, and you could already
see a lot of the other teams were starting
to scratch their heads and look at them like,
"Do they know something we don't?" It appears
they did, because they got first, a third
and a sixth in qualification. Unfortunately,
the heavens opened and it was a notoriously
slippy track, and I think everyone smashed
and nursed their bikes downhill. However,
their qualification round was enough for all
of the teams to start panicking.
Other designers backstage were starting getting
their design heads on and see what they could
botch together to get 29-inch wheels in the
existing frame. It's funny really, because
Santa Cruz did it right. They spent their
time doing testing, they were methodical about
it, their bikes had got longer previously,
they started doing it the right way. Obviously,
now that they knew that this was going to
work, they started to work on the front end
of the frame.
Actually, the 29-inch version of the V10 came
much later but a much more refined-looking
bike. Of course, it's available now. You can
set up in an MX situation as they're calling
it at Santa Cruz, which means, in motocross
style, where you have the smaller backward
and bigger front wheel, some people call it
mullet. Lucas Shaw and Loris Vergier are sticking
to 27.5 on the rear and 29 on the front. Minnaar
is sticking to 29 front and rear, because
that's what works for him. I think it's super
cool that Santa Cruz committed to this. They've
made a series of amazing videos. Some of them
are going to be in the description underneath.
You can watch this.
I want to just say it was brilliant that they
had all of the other teams basically clucking
because they'd suddenly missed the beat here
and that actually, it made it worse for the
other teams when they all started trying to
make [unintelligible 00:15:13] together 29
inch bikes and the riders weren't with it.
You can't just adjust like this. These guys
had done proper structured training around
this and they've worked with Fox suspension
to get everything dialed in, but super cool,
they're the bikers around it. This is a shot
of their latest bike on the screen.
Another manufacturer that always has its work
cut out for it is Maxxis. They launched the
Maxxis Assegai tire and a bit later the Dissector
tire. They were Greg Minaar and Troy Brosnan's
choice of tires. The interesting thing with
any tire manufacturer is they've really got
their work cut out, because as bike technology
gets better, wheel sizes get bigger, they've
always got to have the tires there to suit
them. They've got to have the tires that can
enable the bikes to ride the terrain that
they're designed to ride and at the speeds
they're designed to ride them at.
You think how much things have advanced since
26 inch wheel downhill bikes compared to 29
inch downhill bikes. A good bike rider can
still go extremely fast on 26 but the courses,
no doubt, have been getting rougher and that
is a reflection on what the bigger wheel bikes
can do. As a result, no one can go that fast
if they can't keep their bikes stuck to the
ground so the tire manufacturers really have
their work cut out. Greg Minaar has been particularly
finicky in the best possible sense. He's a
perfectionist, so he knows exactly what he
wants from his bikes.
He'd been a long-term fan of the High Roller
II, but he'd also used other tires like the
Shorty and the Minion DHF and DHR II over
the years, trying a couple together, the right
combination feel, grip, traction, rolling
resistance, that sort of stuff, to suit him
on different courses. There's a tire that
he wanted that wasn't currently in the range.
This is where the Assegai came from. The Assegai
name, by the way, interestingly, is some kind
of Zulu spear, I guess hailing from Greg's
hometown there near Pietermaritzburg.
Really cool because the tire actually takes
features from all of those tires I mentioned.
It has a slightly deeper tread that you see
on the Shorty, something that was really needed
on the super rough multi-terrain courses you're
seeing now, quite often having rock, roots,
mud, sand, water, everything all at once on
a race track. You've got to have a tire that
can really deal with most things and has elements
of both the DHF and the DHR II in the main
sense of tread there.
It combines four tires there to make, really,
the ultimate tire. Iterations of that tire
we've seen on various different Maxxis test
rider team bikes and we've seen it on Greg's
bike. While, although the tread design didn't
appear to change, you can be sure that there
were other changes made. The casing would
have changed, the inserts of protection into
them to make it suitable for downhill would
have changed, the rubber compounds would have
been experimented with. They will have softer
compounds generally for the more competition-based
tires. After all, they haven't got to last,
they've just got to be the maximum gripping
purchase for a race run compared to consumer
tire which quite often are made of firmer
rubbers that can last longer.
There would have been lots of different factors
at play there and the company at Maxxis, they're
always rolling, they're always changing what
they're doing. The Dissector is favored by
Troy Brosnan. He had a lot of input intact
tire. Lastly, is a rear tire. It can be used
as a front, but I believe he uses that one
mostly on the rear but the same principle
involved. Looking for tires that had elements
of other tires. It wasn't quite there. Trying
to pick little bits and pieces from tires.
That's not what we're talking about in this
video. This is all about that particular time
that Greg Minaar developed, over a couple
of seasons of racing. It took two seasons
to develop that to get it from prototype stage,
being ridden out in the field to where you
can buy that tire now. Super cool stuff that.
Next up is a personal favorite of mine, despite
the fact I don't actually have one, is the
Cannondale Lefty Ocho. That's the single crown,
single leg suspension fork. If we skip back
to the Lefty, when that was announced to start
with, it was a bit of a crazy concept. Imagine
having a single-leg fork on a bike. It sounds
crazy, doesn't it? Literally half a fork is
just not there. How can it possibly be stiff
enough?
Look at motorbikes. You quite often see that
approach in the rear ends of motorbikes. We've
seen it on the front end, to be fair, as well.
You see it on the undercarriage of a lot of
aircraft on the landing gear and technically,
with your car with the way the axle is a stub
axle. The same concept [unintelligible 00:19:20]
not suspended from [unintelligible 00:19:21]
You've seen this all around the world in different
applications so it's not that strange. It
just looks very different to the norm but
rumor has it the approach of it is kind of
cool how it started.
Cannondale had a twin-legger regular downhill
fork, so twin crown, twin leg fork and it
was universally known as the stiffest fork
on the market and the reason for this was
it had four-sided stanchion tubes on them,
and on each side of those stanchion tubes,
there were 88 needle bearings going up and
down so the thing was extremely slick. It
wouldn't have any binding, any frictional
stiction in the system, but because it had
a square leg with the bearings, there was
zero movement. It was so stiff that the mechanics
on the race bikes, I think they pretty much
joked that, "Oh, you could probably do away
with the leg." I think essentially, they botched
a hub onto a single leg and then took one
of the legs off and tried it in the car park
and it worked. That really was where the Lefty
was born.
Skip forward to 2018, and they blew everyone's
minds away again when they released a single-crown
version of it. I'm probably not alone here
in thinking that the only way to make that
fork stiff enough was by having it in a twin-crown
design. You've got the support from the head
tube of the bike to make the leg long enough
on the inside to have those four sides with
all those bearings, but they made it even
less. Basically took off the upper crown,
the upper leg on it, so it became a single-crown
and it didn't have a full-sided approach.
It had a three-sided approach as you can see
on these video clips here.
An absolute work of art really as a technical
piece of engineering. It's just astonishing.
As you can tell, I'm still blown away by them,
how they work. They feel amazing. In my eyes,
they look amazing. Some people really struggle
with the look of them, but the coolest thing
is they were race-proven long before they
came out when they announced in 2018 because
the fact that Cannondale, quite crafty with
this, they 3D printed some plastic fake upper
crown units and they had them on team bikes
long before this, so they were race-proven.
They were out there being raced, but no one
knew because it got to a point where you didn't
look at Lefty anymore because you knew they'd
work, you knew they were out there.
Then 2018 came, got rid of a bit of plastic.
Oh, yes. By the way guys, here's our single-crown
fork. Amazing. I love Cannondale. I love what
they always have done. I think they're amazing,
so keep an eye on what Cannondale do because
they've always got interesting tricks up their
sleeve.
The last super cool piece of tech I want to
talk about that's come from the race world,
is the Trek Supercaliber. I love my XCO race
bikes at the moment and this I've got to say,
has got to be one of the very best looking
bikes of all time. Look at that. The shock
unit, the IsoStrut system, is a structural
part of the frame. We'll get to that in a
minute though. Trek have had seriously cool
and lightweight race bikes in the past.
You've had the Top Fuel full suspension bike
and you've also had, on the hardtail bikes,
the IsoSpeed decoupler system, which is effectively
a way of enabling the [unintelligible 00:22:09]
bike to be dampened slightly so you could
still pedal a heart out over choppy terrain.
Of course, when you stood up, it doesn't matter,
you don't need that feature, but that was
super cool, but on a hardtail. They needed
to redevelop their suspension bike and they've
done that with this bike.
As you can see on the screen, it looks amazing.
It's a brand new bike. It's a 2020 bike. It's
on the market right now. You can buy this.
It was first seen and it's obviously been
race-proven under the capable feet and ons,
of course, of Jolanda Neff. That's where it
was first seen in Nové Město, which is in
the Czech Republic and one of the rounds of
the XCO World Cup last year. Look at the bike.
It looks amazing and has this crazy shroud
on the top tube. They're covering up what
could only be a shock underneath.
Looking at the back end of the bike, there
was no pivot. Either a flex stay or it was
a [unintelligible 00:22:56] but if you look
on the non-drive side when she's riding past
or racing past at speed, you could see it
had a pivot point there. We knew it was a
full-suspension bike, you just couldn't see
how the bike was working. The bike was ridden
for the whole season and it was a monster.
When they finally took the covering off so
you could actually see the bike, and that
was probably the official launch date of it,
it had this insane shock technology designed
by Trek, built by FOX in conjunction together,
and it's a structural part of the frame, so
very different from other suspension bikes.
The shock is in two parts, you've got the
stanchion tube, which is actually mounted
to the top tube and that is completely solid.
Then you've got the carriage, which is basic
carbon-fiber carriage that slides over the
top of that, and that is part of the rear
end of the bike. It's part of the seat stay.
You have your seals that actually push into
that and you've got the bushing unit inside
that rear part of the bike that slides over
the rest of it.
As a result, it's a very lightweight and a
very stiff system, but it's also got a few
other cool things up its sleeve. It could
run fully rigid, so it does feel like a hardtail
and it's light as a hardtail too, but also
the air spring it can be linear or it can
be very progressive. You can have a feeling
like it has more suspension than it actually
has for the choppier courses or you could
run it really quite progressive for those
where you just need that little bit of sting
taken out of the tail, but you need the bike
to feel nice and punchy. I think Trek are
on it at the moment and I think this is a
super cool bike. I love the fact it was race-proven
long before you could buy the bike in the
shops.
All of this tech I've shown you, no doubt
is very expensive, but you've got to bear
in mind just like with Shimano [unintelligible
00:24:28] told you earlier in the year, that
tech comes in at the top, comes in at XTR
level and it filters down to the SLX level.
This is the same with all bike manufacturers.
They all have to work in this way because
it's the best way to develop the stuff at
a cost that they're going to get a comeback,
can get a return on it.
I think all of this cool technology, you will
start seeing this on cheaper bikes down the
line. Quite exactly what order that's going
to happen in, I don't know, but there's loads
of other cool stuff out there. Of course,
we saw the FOX 38 being used or at least the
FOX fork with a bizarre shaped arch. We now
know the 36 and the 38 have that on them,
and we've also seen the RockShox ZEB come
out of a race background as well. It's super
cool. There's always cool stuff going on,
so make sure you keep an eye on any upcoming
races to see what those pro racers have got
bolted to their bikes because it's pretty
sure you're going to see something that's
either current or something that's not so
current that might be forthcoming down the
line.
I'd love to know what you think are the most
cool parts that you've seen in this video.
I'd love to know what your favorite race parts
are ever that have been developed. Maybe an
old Boxer 151, Black Box Fort from back in
the '90s, literally anything. Let us know
what you think. Thanks for hanging around
and hear me talk about all the cool favorite
tech I've seen in races. As always, please
don't forget to subscribe to our channels
and give us some love in our shops as well
because we've got loads of cool kit around.
At the moment, we're launching limited edition
stuff all the time. See you later.
