Video: USA-made Flat Pedals from a New York Machine Shop 1

PRESS RELEASE: From Burning Corvettes to Billet Aluminum, Introducing DarkTide

DarkTide started in a place we didn’t expect.

In 2021, founder Mark Petronis was involved in a catastrophic racing accident that left him trapped in a burning Corvette, burned over 35% of his body, and hospitalized for four months. At the time, he didn’t know if he would ever race again. During recovery, he found himself watching Red Bull Hardline from a hospital bed. What started as a distraction slowly turned into something else: if racing cars was no longer guaranteed, maybe two wheels could still offer a way back to a life of speed, consequence, and purpose.

 

Mark's Crashed C5 Corvette

Mountain biking had been a huge part of Mark’s life in his teens and early twenties, but like a lot of things, it eventually faded into the background as business, racing, and life took over. After 27 surgeries, a long recovery, and a trip to Whistler in 2023, he found his way back to it. It gave him something racing had always provided: focus, risk, progression, and the feeling that the best moments are usually the ones that scare you a little.

Before long, that return to riding started to overlap with what Mark and his team already did on a daily basis: design, test, and manufacture of track-focused Corvette components.

For more than a decade, Mark and the team at AMT Motorsport have designed, tested, and manufactured parts for Corvettes built for serious track use. Those parts live in a world where weak designs, bad materials, and sloppy manufacturing get exposed quickly. That same approach — strength first, real testing, tight control over the process, and in-house manufacturing — became the foundation for DarkTide.

 

Our first product is the Bear Trap flat pedal.

 

The Bear Trap Pedals: Available in 3 Colors

Pedals made sense as a starting point because they are one of the few parts you feel every second you are on the bike. A good flat pedal should disappear under your foot. It should grip when things get rough, survive rock strikes and massive drops, be easy to service when it finally needs attention and look great while doing it. We wanted to build a pedal that felt aggressive and secure without turning into a gimmick. We did not want to invent a fake problem just to justify a new pedal. We bought ten different sets of pedals we already liked, paid attention to the details, and tried to make our version just a little better everywhere we could.

 

Machined In-house at Our Upstate New York Facility

The Bear Trap is designed and made in-house at our facility in Clifton Park, New York. The body is CNC-machined from aluminum, with a wide, supportive platform shaped to feel planted, predictable, and easy to move around on. The concave pin layout was developed to provide real bite through rough sections while still allowing the foot to be adjusted when needed. Internally, the pedal is built to be serviceable, with durability and long-term ownership in mind.


 

Rear Loading Pins Create a Concave Platform Shape

Every Set of Titanium Axles is Heat Anodized for a Beautiful Finish

We know there are already great pedals out there and we’re not pretending otherwise. DarkTide is our take on what a no-excuses flat pedal should be: brutally strong, rebuildable, easy on the eyes, made under our own roof, and backed by riders who actually own the machines that make the parts.

That last part matters to us. Making components in-house gives us control over the process from prototype to production. It lets us choose the material, inspect the work, change the design, test new ideas, and stand behind the final product without hiding behind a supplier on the other side of the world. We are not interested in putting our logo on catalog parts. If it says DarkTide, we want to know how it was made, why it was made that way, and how we are going to support it if a rider has a problem.

That is also why all our pedals are backed by our lifetime warranty. If you manage to break it, we’ll make it right.

We may be new to the mountain bike world as a brand, but we’re not new to designing and making parts that have to survive abuse in the real world.
The full pedal line up is available now at DarkTide

GALLERY: "GOING THE MILE" AT THUNDER MOUNTAIN

To launch the brand, we recently spent time at Thunder Mountain Bike Park filming our first full riding edit, Going The Mile, with Riley Box and Josh Billow. The goal was simple: show the product in the environment it was built for, by riders who are pushing the limits.

Photos and Video: Phitted Media

 

Riley Ripping a Dusty Hawleywood Berm

DarkTide X AMT Motorsport

Josh Billow folding one up

Going to the moon on The Wall

Josh doing his thing

Huge Thank You to Phitted Media and Up The Way Productions

DarkTide