All

@notthatbryan - crazy story! and yeah, i forgot "syncopy" in the term. the human body is fascinating. re: fantasy, i think we'll keep normal timing after Q2 like last year and will discuss rider values. thanks for the input, everyone.

Please don’t change the fantasy system, if you do it’ll be the same as pinkbikes and theirs is boring as hell since starting to play the vital one, you pick your team and they have a crash in qualies.. great, fantasy team wrecked for the whole weekend. The Vital system encourages you to come back over the race weekend and make tweaks based on what you see .. it rains for finals day? Shit better change the team, rider B had fast splits in qualies but a minor mistake? That’s a sleeper, I’ll add him etc..

2026 Global League has been created. Join to be eligible for prizes - https://www.vitalmtb.com/fantasy/leagues We're running the same program in 2026 Game opens after receiving the official qualifying start list and add rider values (should be sometime Weds next week for South Korea) - will announce when live here and the countdown clock will show up when game is live, too. Game closes a couple hours before Junior DH finals start time (which is 11:30am local time in South Korea), so those who want to keep tabs on who makes the show, can make stronger predictions. No season overall prizes...

add me to the list again, I always thought I had just a noisy EP8 motor. turns out it was my fidlock bottle just rattling this whole time after replacing it with a traditional bottle cage. 4 years it took me to figure this out lol what a dumbass.

I get the sentiment of what you're saying... but I would contend that the avinox motors have throttles... you just operate them by moving your feet. 460w of output with 25w of input, 800w of output with 100w of input and max power being delivered at 160w of rider input, is not pedal assist. It is pedal driven throttle assist.

it's almost as much as your megatower.

I think the course looks great. Natural, off camber, multiple lines in the trees. I think it'll break down and cut up great. As others have said, I like to see some janky slow speed corners that will seperate the riders instead of bike park berms. A new venue in a new corner of the world. This is what I was hoping to see. Looking forward to seeing some of the practice footage

shot from the ucimtbworldseries site (doesn't have #'s, but gives you visual idea if you're familiar w/ the area.)

Rim manufacturers that offer lifetime warranties hate this track. Rim manufacturers that don't offer lifetime warranties love this track.

Massanutten DHSE is BRUTAL (and awesome)

This is video gold. Need moar of these vibes!

Quoting measurements to 0.01mm on an aluminium mountain bike frame; they are very very over confident in the manufacturing capability of the factory.

Surron had a prominent presence at Sea Otter, and a number of kids were riding these e-motos (along with pit bikes) throughout the expo in ways that were disruptive and inconsiderate. I’m still developing my perspective on high-powered eMTBs (which I consider a separate thing), but it’s hard to ignore how often these machines seem to encourage poor behavior — or at least attract it. I often hear the argument that it’s better for kids to be outside on bikes (of any sort) than indoors glued to their phones. In principle, I agree. But increasingly, it feels as though the...

I half wrote an essay before realising it was more of a rant; essentially I think the power wars risk breaking the social contract of responsible land use, where I live we have very small woods and they’re intensively used for recreation. The tacit agreement is that you’re allowed to do you there under your own power, no dirt bikes, no quads etc. If this is perceived to be broken because you can razz around on fire road climbs at 20mph then I reckon land managers will just ban bikes altogether because it would be too difficult to only ban...

I got ~30 minutes each with Avinox and Bosch and am still figuring out what to do with the content (podcast or writing). Unsurprisingly, Bosch is a bit "disappointed" (I'm paraphrasing) in the direction Avinox is pushing the industry. They leaned heavily into trail access and stewardship, and suggested the current crop of high-output motors doesn't jive with the effort they've put into balancing stakeholders and leading the powertrain side responsibly. For fun, I looked back to see if Bosch has ever pushed power or torque limits on their own accord, and from what I can tell the answer is...

That's why they are releasing this now: "Hey boss, can we start teasing the new goods? Not yet, gotta wait until thegromit orders the current version...."

I just got my madonna..........

Most of you probably won't like hearing this. I certainly didn't. Earlier this week I had a chat with a guy who works in a product management role for Ralf Bohle GmbH, which is the owner of the Schwalbe tire brand. Mainly I asked a bunch of XC racing related questions, about compounds, casings, radial ply, rolling resistance testing, wheter we'll ever see the speediest XC casing with a black sidewall and why they felt they needed to change their naming scheme for casings and compounds. The gist of it is that they are hard at work behind the scenes...