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Shoot, I thought Oregon had the gnarliest of trails...

Same here, everybody around me prefers to ride an enduro bike even when a trail bike would be faster and more fun. I ride a SB130 that's also overbuilt to piss with DH tires and LR spec stuff and have no problems flying with it to ride parks like Morzine, and never really wished for more travel apart from at the end of the day where arm pump starts to get to you. Everybody thinks I'm crazy for doing it but if you take the time to set it up properly with enough support etc it can hit anything fine...

Yep.... I don't want to see another Erice first elite year thanks!

also 100% of them tried selling bikes with grips installed

Let's face it this thread was the ebike of forum threads (easy, doesn't take any actual effort to follow). I welcome the individual threads 😎

having BC and DAK on your squad and you become the people’s team immediately.

@Downtime Podcast Been busy and have sporadically been able to follow the thread. I haven’t listened to the DT podcast. Haven’t listened to Brines debrief. But I do know this. MF asked/paid Chris to provide a platform. Chris did that. Jumping on Chris for not asking the right questions is crap. MF was on the back foot from the company crisis. Chris didn’t put him there. MF had every opportunity to at least clear the air and admit wrongdoing. At any point during the pod MF could have said “Let me say this about that”. MF had an open mic...

You're very entitled to your own opinion, but I didn't hear the same contradictions you did. I've re-listened multiple times this morning and I still can't hear it the way you have. I heard Markus say they knew they were facing tough times but weren't expecting the PE firm to get to a point where they aren't willing to inject cash. The Fire Sale was an effort to get through that specific period without having to ask for more cash. That failed and then they were told 'no more'. As for your previous point, it's not exactly clear to me...

I used to have a shitty bike rack you could pretty easily just steal off the car if you wanted, and I had to head into the shop. I was so proud of my idea to back up perfectly to a pole so I could lock my bike to the pole without having to take it off the rack. Came out of the shop, jump in my car and promptly ripped my bike off the rack driving away breaking the straps it was attached with and giving it a big ol scratch.

You will be giving up nothing* by switching to a non-piggyback Deluxe Ultimate. It's a great shock and can take a beating. Honestly, super impressive for what it is. And back in the day we had to race multi-thousand foot enduro track on air shocks before they even had reservoirs. They were mostly fine. I think the bigger shocks only come into play when you're hitting repeated big nasty impacts and generating a lot of heat over and over and over again. The only time I really hated that non-piggyback shock was when I took it into the Whistler Bike...

I second this. I believe resident suspension engineer @Dave_Camp was the engineer on this one. I tested a pre-production unit at some point and liked it a lot as long as the descent was not crazy long. I often ran the rebound a touch slower than usual to account for fade, since the shock would speed up as it got hot (less oil...but it worked great). One other note: it might have been the most durable shock I ever owned. I still have it, never rebuilt, and it has served as a backup on a number of frames.

Thanks to those who've taken time to write kind words about Downtime. I was expecting to get some hate for this episode as there is definitely a lot of frustration out there on this topic and Markus appears to be a very polarising character. For what it's worth, I put in the time to understand the concerns of the MTB world as much as was possible from forums etc and I believe that all those key points were covered in this interview. I also took time to understand the mechanisms of Private Equity and just why growth is essential and...