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Trinidad, Colorado

It’s curious how Greg (Norco, really) and Neko are saying completely different things. Neko spends two years developing a race bike and concludes you can’t adjust anything independently, every change will affect something else. And complexity breeds its own challenges with marginal performance improvement. Norco heads in the exact opposite direction, highly complex suspension with claims of independent adjustability. Making those changes in isolation would be so time consuming. To slacken the head angle and keep bb height the same you’ve have to switch out flip chips for both. Changing HA alters your front center, unless you move the BB...

She rode conti tires last year already, didn't she?

I think this forum (and industry in general) makes too much fuss about the frame design. I think the fork is as or more important than frame, your front wheel has to steer and do the majority of the braking. Id rather race a good fork over a good frame if I had to choose. But to answer the question- it’s 90% rider 10% bike. And any rig out on the circuit can get you 7-8% with proper setup and tuning.

bro's recognizing peoples hands now.... this thread is getting so good and weird at the same time. When someone knows what someones toes looks like I'll bow out. Carry on.

The new mondraker team is going to be fine. they have good suspensions (fox), good tires (maxxis), good geometry (proto bike has adjustment), lots of team support and staff. They have a race engineer and I’m sure they can modify the bike if needed. if the bikes antisquat is slightly off that is not going to ruin someone’s career.

I get where you’re coming from, but there’s so much profit margin for manufacturers that comes from the build kit. OEM prices, especially for larger companies, is bonkers. I know that for some companies frame-only sales lose money. Thanks for everyone’s input! If it weren’t for the wondering about how a bike with a touch longer chainstays would ride I would be super happy with my bikes. I’m likely to consider a jump to a higher rise bar, play around with my good ol’ 36mm stanchions fork, and spend my money on coaching and experiences.

This is a great question! UPCOMING ESSAY WARNING: I know I'm an outlier but, for me, getting a new bike is kinda the worst. For example, it takes me about 3-4 months to feel truly dialed on a new mountain bike. I can get any new bike feeling “rideable" pretty quickly, but I’m talking about getting the bike to fit like a glove to the point that riding it feels like second nature. "New bike day" requires tuning the bike's fit and suspension simultaneously, two parameters that affect each other. Not to mention that you’re pretty much guaranteed to need...

I know this answer will be downvoted especially on this forum, but... I personally got rid of my upgraditis back in 2018, when I bought my first e-bike. Previously, I had changed my bike every other year, always buying one of the cheaper models and swapping over almost every component to mid/high end stuff. Every bike swap brought some clear benefits from 12mm axles, 29 wheels, geometry etc. Once I got my e-bike, with heavy cheap wheels, a heavy cheap drivetrain and its 23kg, which I got closer to 24kg once I put the heaviest DH tyres I could find...

Full FW team:

Anyone know what they would be using from Specialized (logo - center of jersey)? Saddles?

Don’t blame TeamRobot for that ****

Childhood impure thoughts unlocked unexpectedly.

When doing development you’re splitting hairs- typically looking for tiny improvements. the time of day and rider fatigue plays a huge factor. Suspension feels terrible first run after lunch with a sandwich still bouncing around in your stomach. Then a few runs later fatigue sets in and everything feels crappy. very hard to test A/B/A setups with similar conditions, fatigue levels etc. A poorly timed flat tire can ruin a day of testing. You run out of time to do the repeats and get frazzled etc.

I’d agree- dyno doesn’t always tell the full story. It’s an extremely useful tool but you must do blind ride testing as well. MTB suspension testing is incredibly difficult and frustrating from my experience.