#ProjectFun – First Look
Riding bikes should be about having fun. So we wanted to build a bike that we thought we could maximise fun with.
Ok, so it’s rare that riding your bike isn’t fun. No matter what the weather, what the trail conditions, how your bike is working, being out riding is fun. With hindsight you’ll realise that even the supposed bad days were pretty good. You won’t ever regret being out on your bike.
But occasionally I’ll have moments when, no matter what, I’m just not feeling it, where the endorphins aren’t flowing, where I’m not putting the lines together and I’m not flowing on the trails like I would want to. I’m far from being pro and I’m content, like most, with just putting together a fast run that pushes my limits and starts to take me beyond them. But I seemed to be having fewer and fewer of those moments and I was starting to doubt my own ability on a mountain bike. Maybe I’d just lost it, whatever ‘It’ is. Worst of all was that I was slowly finding riding less enjoyable.
I looked at everything from my own confidence, my fitness, bike set-up, the trails I was riding. everything I could think of that could be affecting my enjoyment of riding a bike. The simple fact was I wasn’t enjoying it as much as I used to and because I wasn’t enjoying it I wasn’t riding particularly well and because I wasn’t riding particularly well I was enjoying it even less and on it goes.
Earlier this year I was up at my local Downhill spot trying once again to find that sweet spot where the adrenaline kicks in and every run just gets better and better but once again I felt completely flat, demotivated and uninterested. As I was preparing for the uplift I was chatting to a guy who commented that I looked like I’d rather be anywhere but here. He was right. I started to explain how I was struggling and not enjoying my riding anymore and I mentioned that as a result I was considering selling my downhill bike and just getting myself a cheap and cheerful hardtail for some mucking about on instead. “oh no” he said, “you don’t want to do that, you’ll not be as quick on a hardtail and if you’re not enjoying it now you definitely won’t enjoy it on something that is slower” he was right of course, I would be slower on a hardtail, no question. Then he said “you may feel like you’re going faster but you won’t be anywhere near on the clock. A Downhill Bike soaks everything up, a hardtail will just beat you up and make the trail way too sketchy and scary”. And that was it. The epiphany. The moment of clarity. I wasn’t interested in beating the clock, I actually wanted to ‘feel like I was going faster’ I want the trail to be ‘sketchy and scary’, I want the trail to ‘beat me up’.
That’s the point, when you first chucked yourself down a hill or hit a jump when you were a kid and scared yourself silly you weren’t worrying about split times or geometry or god forbid; wheel size. You were just having fun. So that’s what I wanted to build, a bike that was just fun, a bike that could take everything I could throw at it that wouldn’t just effortlessly soak up all the joy that the trail had to offer. And also as a caveat I didn’t want to have a build budget that could buy me a house.
So we’ve built a bike, on a modest budget, with kit that we know works that we think will do exactly what we want it to do. We’ll be testing and reviewing all the components and seeing how they all fair against whatever we can throw them up against. Over the coming weeks we will be testing and reviewing the following –
– DMR Bolt (Long) Frame
– Shimano Zee Groupset
– Shimano Zee Brakes
– Pro Atherton Finishing kit
– Superstar DHX Wheels
We’re looking forward to trying out this kit over the next couple of seasons to see how it will handle 2 seasons of racing and riding.
Huge thanks to –
