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have you ridden one?
bike looks insane
good luck mik!!!!!
Haven't ridden one but the bike looks interestingly strange (subjective of course)
- Downtube too bulky and curvy around BB junction
- Elevated chainstay (rear) proportion too big compared to the front triangle
- Overall the bike looks like always in "bottomed out" position
But still hope it get the job done and podium for Mik at the worlds! Good luck..
Remember the Haro?
I remember watching an old Aussie flick (or Earthed?) where he was riding his Haro up and down these massive rock features, with 10' drops into steep hairpin turns. Bike was rediculously tall and looked awkward as hell to push that thing around, yet he somehow managed to make it work for him.
And to add it it, he's got mad respect from me for throwing a No-Hander at every race in honor of Stevie.
The makulu he re-emerged on with Unitedride was certainly not crap and got better reviews than many of the aforementioned bikes from SC, Trek, Spesh and Giant, even the team was smaller.
As for his current bike, the guys at Unitedride have basically had the opportunity to develop the bike they wanted with Polygon, and have ended up with a bike with good angles and pretty good kinematics after a ton of race driven r&d. I have yet to hear that it is "crap", even if there are bikes out there with more prestige. Even the Judge had relatively good kinematics, even if the geo was a bit on the short side reach wise and the bb high pre-sag - but then again, so were nearly all the other bikes of that era (go back and check the geo of the V-10 of that era...).
Admittedly though, the fury he rode for a bit was a bit of a wonky design, where both the geo and kinematics were simply sub par. Then again Marc Beaumont made it work for him though and won Val di Sole on it, so i guess if the rider is riding at the limit and with a high confidence, a lot of design shortcomings can be overcome.
as for this prototype, based on the reviews of the current crop of bikes with this rear suspension system, it might actually make for quite the grippy, if not terribly poppy yet pedal-friendly dh bike. It might not win any awards for being the prettiest, but if it works... Function over form right? It will be interesting to see where it goes, but with it seemingly being made from carbon, indications are that they are pretty close to production
- The rear end is VERY flexy. Like, not even remotely close to the most flexy rear ends, way beyond that. You can move the rear end so much by hand that the linkage plates can hit the seat mast. Those tiny little plates are so thin that I thought they were plate steel. The swingarm is so long that those little plates are not up to handling those side loading forces. I could feel it in the parking lot, which says a lot.
- The bike needs a longer travel fork. It feels unbalanced. I think if it were designed around a 170mm fork it would retain the good pedaling aspects of the design but possibly not look like a grasshopper.
Someone claims to have seen people testing a DH bike like this in Smithfield (Cairns)...
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