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Words: Dan Roberts || Photo: Sebastian Schieck
Jack of all trades, master of none applies to trail and enduro bikes pretty well. When you have to go up, down, and all around the hills, there are compromises in terms of geometry, suspension and performance for those starkly different terrains. This means these bikes are good at doing everything but perhaps not truly great at each specific one. It’s why we see such variety in the shapes of bikes on offer, as you can have everything from lightweight ground-covering focussed whippets to hard-charging sleds that are happy to spend the day doing park laps.
On the other hand, a downhill race bike is a very focused tool for one specific job: getting from the start hut to the finish line as fast as possible. There’s no mud in those waters. And while the terrains downhill bikes are raced on might be as varied as the riders that swing a leg over them, every time the beeps go off, it’s the same purpose that drives them.
So what makes them so damn cool? Easy: speed. Hot, nasty, bad-ass speed. While trail and enduro bikes will encompass a vast range of velocities, from slightly faster than walking pace to out-of-control, about-to-abandon-ship fast, downhill bikes are ridden at consistently flat-out speeds. That focuses how the bike and rider will interact in those conditions, how the rider positions themselves on the bike, and prioritises things like chassis composure, predictability and the feel of what the wheels are up to. Traction might not be there all the time, so when the wheels break free, it’s essential to have a clear path for the information at the contact patch to flow up to the rider’s brain.
But don’t think for one minute that this makes downhill bike development a walk in the park. Any bike is such a myriad of factors, details and numbers that it can often get a bit overwhelming for even the smartest-fingered of individuals. Bike development is like juggling a hundred balls in the air. While downhill bikes might take away some of these balls, as you’re not spending four hours climbing on one and don’t need to fit a water bottle on it, all the balls are on fire with the sheer ferocity at which they can be ridden.
Pedalling is still an important aspect that a downhill bike needs to cope with. But on the race track, the rider’s position on the bike, and so the centre of gravity, will be in a very different place to when you’re sat chugging up a fire road on a trail bike. There are also more wildly oscillating parts of a rider when sprinting hard for the win. So concepts like anti-squat need to be refined to help the bike resist the riders’ legs and body moving all over the place and keep the power they’re expelling going efficiently to a rear wheel with grip.
Quality, not quantity, also plays a huge role. While downhill bikes have settled around the 200mm travel mark, it’s not enough to rely on the extra bounce over a trail or enduro bike to do the work. Every millimetre of travel needs to be considered, both in bump and rebound, and in conjunction with all the other suspension aspects, to ensure that it’s utilised efficiently, not second guessing what the bike might do as they come hurtling into a jagged rock garden, and provide a platform for speed week in and week out.
Everyone at a World Cup race always has one eye on what everyone else is doing, ready to find the next hot ticket to their success. And bike development never sits still. Behind the scenes are crews of, essentially, geeks, ready to jump as the techno-fuelled game of musical chairs starts again. Even though you might be seeing the latest iterations of bikes between the tape, you can be sure that there’s some idea being fleshed out, some theory being tested, back at the brand’s HQ. That might be why we’re seeing such a foray into the ever more complicated. As the development curve naturally starts to become less intensely steep, brands are looking further into the bikes to extract the last few per cent of performance needed to differentiate between first place and first loser. The number of links in bikes is off the charts; drivetrains resemble the timing belts on a car’s engine; data acquisition is almost mandatory for entry, and we’re even seeing electronic suspension on downhill bikes, giving riders the ability to choose between different suspension modes on track – or in the future perhaps, letting the bike do the choosing itself.
We’re in a very exciting time for downhill bike development. Maybe not all the innovations that give an advantage between the tape are suitable for your average weekend warrior. But with the constant razor-sharp focus that comes with downhill racing pushing the riders and the bikes forward at a rate of knots, we’re only making the coolest genre of bikes even cooler.
By Dan Roberts, bike reviewer and designer.
If you enjoy reading this, you should check out the Hurly Burly. It’s got many features like it, plus round-by-round accounts of the UCI Downhill World Cup and pore over hundreds of the best images of the season in Hurly Burly Book.
