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New brakes, coming out soon from famous ( B )rake company in collab with american ( S )upreme bike company.

I feel a lot of people that would complain about the gearbox efficiency making a perceivable difference to their enduro or all mountain ride would be the same people with overbuilt wheels, fox 38, cushycores, and downhill casing tires for multiple blues a maybe a black diamond trail for their saturday ride. Then finish it off with pounding back 4 IPAs and some cake later that day.

I used to ride moto with an engineer that worked on gearboxes for a major bike manufacturer. At that time, I had just begun mountain biking and didn't pay much attention to all of the tech. But I remember him telling me that although there were many real advantages to gearboxes, it simply wasn't possible to improve the efficiency to cassette like levels as gearboxes, by design, would always have more friction as a consequence of the gears meshing, turning clusters, oil, extra bearings and seals. I'm sure some additional optimization will occur in time but to make a gearbox...

Check out Poirot over here! Fine detective work sir. It's not like we haven't been talking about it for the last 10 pages.

In general the comments about gearboxes themselves get comments about inefficiencies. Whichever way you spin it, there are more bearings and seals involved with a gearbox plus a plethora of gear pairs (either loaded or unloaded) which all add to additional drag. In the case of Rohloff you have planetary gears (lots and lots of bearings and gears) while Pinion is quite a lot simpler. Still in that case you have a 2-stage geared gearbox, either a 3x3, 3x4 or a 3x6 layout (for 9, 12 or 18 speed variants) where you at least have to support the input, the...

Did you say Dan Atherton 👀

Camden Rutherford to intense factory racing. Pivot dropped the ball so hard losing this kid, jackson goldstone jr.

Yeah this kid's the real deal, one name to keep in your head this season

"no one is watching" UK/Ireland you mean, plenty of people still watching. And lets face it, this was coming all along and yes it will come to rest of the world too at some point, just like every other sport. Hockey (national and NHL), football, NFL, F1, rally, depending on the package deal that's 35-80 euros in Finland, so in a year or two, DH is just another acronym on that list. Trying to grow something is a bitch, it will make people angry (as it did with those another sports which were much cheaper too at some point) but...

Nah, smart business! There is certainly plenty of mountain bikers who will pay enough to cover the losses of both of those businesses. 🤣 500 million mountain bikers paying $30 per month for 6 months and it breaks even.

Bushing require tight tolerances and proper maintenance. The cycling industry is crappy at tight tolerances. Most cyclist are crappy at maintenance. It's a win win resulting in the horrible reputation that bushings have. Like press fit bearings, they are the correct engineering solution. But that would require the bike industry to stop being crappy.

bike industry media folks: "how can we alter this image just enough to mess with the vital forums"

custom YT decoy with intend goods on it for markus flossmann

agreed.

Also, I hate to say it, but I think larger volume tyres roll faster, as shown in road and XC: https://www.schwalbetires.com/technology-faq/rolling-resistance/ I'm doing decent speed for a respectable rider, but not tyre ripping off the rim issues like WC pros, so maybe my requirements are different.

I think the other tyres are more draggy, but can't make up this time loss through the corners. I guess if you are losing time on every straight the emphasis is on the rider to make this up in the corners, which seems to be asking too much as the Vigilante corners great as well. Assegai feels epic because you approach the corner slower (more drag) which makes everything easier, but this feeling is misleading.

I did A-B-A testing on each day aiming to get in 5 quality laps before swapping tyre, then 5 laps, swapping back again and another 5 laps. Timing was done by picking the exact GoPro frame where I crossed a specific feature on the trail, e.g. tree, rock, post etc so that I could get accurate timing to 1/60th sec and construct a perfect lap taking the best from each sector. The results often surprised me and I think "feel" can be misleading. The Assegai for example felt epic, but in the data it is slower in every sector.

A little bit of contrast and image levelling and it’s super clear. Yeti nailed down.

Burgtec cockpit and DT Swiss wheels matches Richie Rude's setup too I think, downtube protection looks similar.