How Much Further Can Mountain Bike Design Be Pushed? Wild Bikes From Eurobike 2024

Super! After ten hours of rain, everything is wet on your tent and your sleeping bag. What I tell you is best. Where are you supposed to sleep now? There comes a picker out of nowhere. Drives under his window. Shit! This is a Black Math bike made by Alex in Poland. And it's got two distinct riding modes. What we've got here is the uphill climbing mode. And actuating what would be a dropper post lever here, we can push it into the downhill riding mode. In this mode it has 170mm rear wheel travel. Here, 140mm rear wheel travel. Now, this is a four bar linkage and it looks a lot more complicated than it is because of the linkage involved in dropping the frame. This is a hydraulic cartridge here which is essentially from a dropper seat post. And you activate it here and boom, you're back to climbing mode. Now, if you set up the sag in the descending mode to 30%, that will give you a sag of 26% in the climbing mode. Now, the suspension here is a lot more supportive and in the descending mode it's a lot more plush and comfortable. Alex plans to take this bike to production. Not as is, this is just a prototype for now. Changing between the descending mode and climbing mode doesn't just alter the rear wheel travel, it of course alters the geometry as well. So the head tube angle goes from 63.4 degrees down to 63.2 degrees. And the bottom bracket reduces in height from a drop of 28mm to a drop of 39mm. Okay, so just taking it off the stand here to show you how the suspension works. It is just a four bar linkage. The effective seat stay is driving the rear shock there in the climbing mode and then that's how it looks in the descending mode. The leverage curve changes as you go from 140mm of rear wheel travel in this position to 170mm of rear wheel travel in this position. Now we're over at the Goodyear stand. This is a SCORE 6080Z e-mountain bike and it's rocking Goodyear's all new mountain bike tyre called the Wrangler. So we've got a front and rear specific tread pattern. This one is aimed at sort of dry to intermediate conditions as opposed to the Newton which is their more intermediate to soft conditions tyre. The tread pattern is slightly tighter than you see on the Newton. It's a little bit faster rolling. There is an enduro casing and an electric drive casing. The enduro casing tyres, we've got a lighter casing for the MTF which is the front specific tyre as compared to the MTR which is the rear specific tyre. That one's got an extra butyl insert in the sidewall for extra pinch flap protection and just makes the sidewall stiffer. Then even heavier is the electric drive casing. So the weight on this one is close to that of a proper downhill tyre. It's 1400 grams in the electric drive for a 29 by 2.4. There's also a 2.6 inch option. All of them retail at 85 US dollars. That's the case for the electric drive and the enduro casing tyres in MTR and MTF. We're in the handmade area now and this is Alutech Cycles. This is the Pelmo. It's an all mountain bike. It's got 152mm of rear wheel travel paired with a 150mm fork. Quite a nice modern geometry. We've got a 64 degree head tube angle, a 77 degree effective seat tube angle. This one is a mullet but you can run it as a full 29er. The chainstay dropouts here are modular. It's got quite an unusual finish to it because these welds here are sanded. So we've got hydroformed aluminium tubes and CNC machined joins. The frame's got some really nice details. Under here is a frame storage compartment and it just clicks out from the bottom like so. We've got some nice little covers here on the main pivot. We've got a really long and straight seat tube there. This is 400mm so we can fit really long travel dropper seat posts. This one you see here weighs a claimed 13.3kg in a size medium and it retails at €8,500. Yeah, go ahead. I'm being stared at. We're at the Trick Stuff booth and this is the world's lightest 29-inch mountain bike. It is a Scott scale and it might not surprise you to learn that this is the work of Dangerholm or Gustav Gullholm. So Gustav has gone to great lengths to make this frame very, very lightweight. He's polished it as you can see. He's also polished the Fox 34 fork even around the intricacies of the reverse arch. So Dangerholm is famous for making very lightweight bikes but he doesn't make them unrideably lightweight. He actually rides all of his bikes and all of the components seem to be quite reasonable apart from the Schwalbe Thunderbird tyres which are reasonably lacking in tread depth. As you can see, Dangerholm has used a heap of carbon components on this bike. We've got the Darymo seat post with a very unusual design. I'm not sure I'd want to sit on that but each to their own. We've got a carbon stem also from Darymo and their handlebar as well. We've also got some of the world's lightest carbon rims on here. These are from a company called Port. So this bike, as you can see it here, weighs just 13 pounds or 5.86 kilograms. This jaw-droppingly gorgeous bicycle is the Zotseli Nosum. I said it right. So this is made in the Czech Republic by Martin Seider. This is a steel frame. It's an enduro bike. We've got 165mm travel in the rear paired with a 170mm fork. Martin actually makes a variety of different suspension linkages for his bikes. This is a dual-link design but he makes various other VPP linkages and linkage-driven single pivots. So there's some really unique features about this frame. Martin actually bends these steel plates into position and then welds the joints and then sands them off. A really nice feature here is this little bottom opener here on the non-drive side. We've got steel tubes inside the main steel tubes for cables. And we've got a super minimalist rear brake mount here. So this frame is available as a frame only and it retails at €2,800 without the shock. And it's available in four sizes, medium to XXL. This is my favourite Zotseli bike. This is called the Nanetro and it's a slope-style bike. It's got 100mm of rear wheel travel delivered by a linkage-driven single pivot layout. And we've got sliding dropouts because you'd run this as a single speed and this is for tensioning the chain. Again, this is a completely steel frame except for the rocker which is a CNC piece of aluminium. The bottom bracket has the main pivot around it in a concentric fashion so that's absolutely massive. And we've got some really nice wells here at the gussets. They're really beautifully executed, they are. We've got another Dangerhome project here. This is the Spark RC with the integrated shock. This one's not particularly lightweight. The aim of this wasn't to produce a very lightweight bike. This is like 10.6kg which is pretty standard World Cup cross-country bike. But we're looking at it because it's got some incredibly unique parts on it. This is a 3D printed handlebar which is a design collaboration between Dangerhome, Trump, the 3D printing specialists and Syncros. So the design of this handlebar makes it look like it's a fully integrated system but it's actually not because the hoses go up into these recesses that run along the underside. Now that should make it ever so slightly easier to work on because you can take the handlebar off without having to disconnect the hoses. So the main section of the bar is 3D printed aluminium. So it's this that hides the top cap. But we've got carbon inserts that sort of are bonded into the aluminium about two or three centimetres the way along. So Gustav has got a bunch of electronic componentry on here. We've got flight attendant for the suspension. We've got an electronic derailleur and an axis seat post. And actuating all of that are these Zerbel shifters here on the handlebar and they are wired in. So running inside this handlebar are those wires and they go to the blip box that Gustav has created like a small recess there in the front of the bar to house. Another unique part is the derailleur. So Gustav has used the SRAM Explore derailleur as the base for this but we've got a 3D printed outer piece of the parallelogram and we've got a very long derailleur cage which is also 3D printed and that was designed in collaboration with Faction Bike Studio in Canada and you can see the details here alluding to that with the maple leaves here. Okay, now we're in the handmade area and I'm here with the Crossworks Trip 290 e-mountain bike. This is a made in Germany aluminium frame. This e-bike is powered by the Bosch SX motor so that has 55Nm of torque and a peak power of 600W. Inside the down tube we have the 400Wh compact tube battery from Bosch and all frame sizes of the Trip 290 can fit the 250Wh range extender. The sizes are medium to XL. The Trip 290 is a linkage driven single pivot. We've got 140mm of rear wheel travel. We've got a nice little sag indicator here on the link that drives the shock. Paired with that 140mm rear wheel travel is a 150mm fork here but it can take a 160mm fork. Super modern geometry. We've got a 65 degree head tube angle. A very steep 79 degree effective seat tube angle with that straight seat tube for long travel. Dropper seat posts. All sizes of the Trip 290 have a 450mm chainstay length. In a size large, this model here weighs 19.5kg. That's without the range extender. So the frame is sold with a two year warranty. You can get this frame set with the motor and battery and range extender for €4,300. The starting price for the complete build is €6,500. This model here with the range extender goes for €8,300. So we're over at the Kenda booth with their new double black gravity tyre. This is the downhill casing. This is their new all conditions tyre. We can see there's quite a familiar looking tread pattern there. This is meant to be noticeably faster rolling than options like the Hellcat which has got that deeper tread profile for more grip in soft conditions. The rubber compound is reasonably soft but it's quite high rebound and we're told that this is meant to be quite a durable compound so that when you go to the bike park you don't just start ripping all the knobs off after an afternoon of shredding. So this one retails at €65. It's available in trail, all-mountain, downhill and enduro casings. In 27.5", it's a 2.4 inch wide tyre and in 29", you've got 2.4 and 2.6. In the 29 by 2.4, this weighs 1,400g in the downhill casing. This is violating.