All

Love to be camped on Dirt Merchant this week to see who’s riding what.

Team Rumors?

I walked that section a few times it was pretty clear that was the B line around the jump.

Reading all of this and thinking about how qualifying has changed for the race and for teams in the World Cup series in general, I think some change is warranted. - 10 second penalty for missing one pole is reasonable but I think you need automatic last place finish if you miss more than one pole (30th place). Otherwise the French lines are coming back which we don’t need - DSQ is too harsh in the final after battling through Q1 and potentially Q2. There needs to be points - I think there needs to be more points for making...

Well that’s gonna end well. UCI- we’ve given rider x a 6.7 sec penalty Rider- no way was that 6.7sec, it was only 0.5 Another rider who gets bumped up- more like 15 My point being how do you allocate a time to each individual case. Maybe if you make the final you’re guaranteed 30th or 15th spot points, and if you or more than one get the current DQ then they just finish joint 30/15. Or, you know, just stay in the poles

To me it doesn’t look like a rule issue, it looks like a course marking issue that commissaires could have rectified before race runs. I think that Comm course walks need to take athlete rep to get a feel for what will happen in Mach chicken race runs - both from a safety perspective and a more general ‘is that unnecessarily restrictive of what a rider might do when riding the bull?’ Perspective. The rule is ok, plenty of sports have the same type of rule. How it’s deployed on any given course (weather is relevant too) is what needs...

Ride inside the poles. They are the same for everyone. If there is one that is in an utterly stupid place, hopefully it gets realised early on in practise and gets moved. Its like a berm. Do you ride the main line through the braking bumps or do you try riding on the smooth top 2.4 inches and risk going over the top? Frankly I'm more impressed that the commisaires were actually watching the runs in such detail that they were able to pick this up within a few minutes. I'm more interersted in justice for Kiefer. Dropped from 6th...

I'll happily die on the hill that the current rule sucks, and has always sucked. A time penalty, that's based on per-incident circumstances, has always made more sense to me. Let the rider continue pushing on their run, and let the governing body of the race do their job and dish out penalties at their discretion. Nothing looks more ridiculous than a rider pushing up the hill in a downhill race to enter the course where they exited. #endpolegate

If the new Transition isn't spotted in the Santa Cruz parking lot, I'll be extremely disappointed..

Could we see a wave of retirements happening at the end of the season? The incoming juniors are just so fast...

Kiran MacKinnon (Santa Cruz) out here doing some testing on a Demo 11… hmmm good stuff We know that V10.9 oughtta be soon

Yes, 100% is the theoretical point that the suspension doesn't compress or extend. In my lasso analogy above, it would equivalent to catching it right around the centre of gravity And yes, published anti squat/rise values assume a certain CoG and it isn't alway the same, so taller/shorter riders or different size bikes will respond a ittle different in the real world, but if you compare 2 bikes with the variables the same then you can roughly guess how they will behave relative to each other

If I'm riding Squamish slabs with an almost infinite amount of grip? Sure, I'll take a front brake only. On every other steep trail in the world where there's a premium of grip, I'll take a rear brake only. Having ridden bikes with rear brakes that failed and bikes with front brake that failed, it's not even a question for me. Sure, the front brake is great on sections where there's grip, and I would miss not having it in those sections, but on the sections with sketchy and inconsistent grip, especially if it's dusty, loose, or features wet roots...

Respectfully, the mass grave that I've filled over the years with cooked brake pads and rotors, broken rear wheels, and punctured tires and inner tubes from riding steep trails tells me that my center of mass has a much stronger relationship with my rear wheel than what you've depicted in that free body diagram. The main difference being bumps and holes. as opposed to the endless monochromatic smooth grade that's implied by the instantaneous snapshot of your freebody diagram.

Geometry is preserved but that’s only because the force of your weight shifting forward is equal to the force driving the bike into compression. A perfectly 0% antirise bike would feel like someone grabbing the back of your back wheel, an OTB machine