All The Details On Gearbox Bikes At The Bielsko-Biala World Cup in Poland | PB Tech

Matt Beer hunted down the belt drive bikes in the pits at the Polish World Cup to see the different methods in play.

00:00 – Intro
00:28 – Gamux
03:39 – Atherton
06:30 – Scott Spy Shot
06:55 – Intense
08:49 – Zerode

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What’s up? I’m Matt. We are here at the first World Cup in Beielco, Biala, Poland. In front of me, I have Haddie Harton’s downhill bike. She just won an Enduro World Series with a belt drive. And this one also has a belt drive. We’re going to go around to the pits, see what different teams are doing to deal with the muddy conditions here on the belt drive bikes, and also see what else we can spot. So, let’s get into it. We’re here in the AON pits with Pascal. We’ve got Reese Wilson’s bike in the stand. Pascal, what’s going on with this bike? In terms of the frame, the front end is just a stock front end right now. Um, we’re having a longer swing arm on it, so we can swing off the back as they say, a bit more and have still confidence in his front, but the whole team now is on the short stem, high rise or high stack kind of setup. Yeah. Um, that’s just something that particularly Reese found early on in testing that this will help the Dorado specifically. It just calms the handlebars down and um, the fork obviously does have more flex than a conventional fork. So, there’s no issue um, with it gripping up correctly. So, you don’t need to lean over the front end as much as you probably would need with a 40 or a rock shocks or whatever. Okay. And what length is the stem? This this one I think is a 25. Okay. Um and then some other riders are on a 20 or a 30. It really depends their personal taste. So, and the crown the offset, this a 47 offset. Okay. So, we’re running the shorter offset. We should we we would have the option to run the longer one, but we found this kind of combination to do the trick for us. So, I’m into that. I like that. Short short as well. And then what is the head angle roughly? So head angle is depending on what kind of swing arm we’re using and what kind of tire combination we’re using. It’s around 63 degrees. Okay. Plus minus2.3° depending on axle to crowns and stuff like this. But see he’s got rev grips. Those are the grips that the elasters built into the lock. So they actually move a bit. Yeah. I think Ree earlier on in his career was on them and he loved them from the start. So when we or he got the chance to basically pick whatever he wanted, that was his go-to. He saves your hand. He’s back on clips. Reese was running flats a lot in the offseason. Was that just to kind of test the limits, push the bike? I think he just likes to be on flats during winter to go back to basics on technique and it just teaches you to ride the bike a bit differently and you feel also different stuff on suspension. Maybe one one other thing, we’re running like quite short cranks. This is a 155 15. So it’s putting his hips a bit higher up. You’re if you stand like this, you’re kind of locked. Yeah. So if you pull your feet back together, your your hips are a bit more free and you can do a bit of the salsa dancing a bit more easy. So Okay. So legs, fork legs, grips, everything’s a little bit flexible. Got it. I also see uh you have a a bit of a shroud or a guard. Yeah, that’s mainly to protect the belt and also when it’s going to be muddy like this. We trying to figure out if this actually helps with preventing just, sorry for my English, but getting stuck basically between the sprocket and the gearbox. We do have uh special pads that warm up quicker from center. Okay. Um which we will use in the rain. So that’s been in the development for the last couple of weeks. Okay. We’re outside the specialized pits and what they can tell us is they can’t tell us anything. I can confirm that they do have bikes with two chains and there are some brakes on there that are not identified. All right, so we’re here in the Atherton pits with Ben. Uh there is a lot to talk about on this bike. It’s obviously the new belt drive, the high pivot, the six bar. Um Ben, you’ve got some more configurations or more stuff going on here for the snow as well. Yeah, this is probably like the second variation of the gear uh belt drive bike that we’ve made. Um, we’ve been playing around with carbon layup on the chain stays just to get some different flex and seat stays. Uh, we’ve got like a bolt-on, bolt-off brace option with like endless adjustability. We can do one aluminium plate. We can do a nylon plate, titanium plate, like double top, up and down, back. So, we’ve got like lots of different variations we can play with there, which is cool. As well as changing carbon thickness. We’ve got a few things that we’ve updated recently for the mud and the snow. Um, we’ve got some caliper covers that go on here. So, it just keeps anything out the top of there. We’ve just been to Fort William ISS. We were It’s rocky there. Even with the extra ground clearance that we gained from this bike, we had a few rock strikes. So, we’ve just made uh basically battering basically the same as what you’d have on a down bike like a normal downer bike, conventional down bike. So, yeah. I’ve been playing around with different we call this the snubber on the back. It’s the equivalent of if you have a chain guide on the front of your chain ring. It just helps keep the belt on the back wheel. So, we’ve been playing around with having ones with rollers, different thickness rollers where we move that gap to no roller. So, we’ve have ones that are just a little plate cuz this is quite a compact, tight area. If you can kind of keep this as clean as possible, you’re fine. Any mud back here is not a problem. It just gets flicked off and bounced off by the rear wheel anyway. New DHX2 coil shock, new FSA stem. Uh FSA stem and bar. So, it’s the new gradient this season. And they’ve just released the pinion pinion crank. Yeah, it’s electronic shifter. So, it’s pretty cool. You don’t even need a pedal. You can pedal if you want. Um, it’s we set the mounting angle and you can tell it when you want to change gear. So, basically, if he’s full load cranking and he hits the shift button, it will just wait until he’s top dead center. Okay? So, when pedals are under least load and then it will just shift then. So, it’s seamless. You don’t even notice it if you’re on the pedals shifting. It just like it’s it’s really cool. There’s like a wiring loom that comes with the gearbox with a smart shift. Okay. So, there’s a battery pack, few cables that we’ve made a basically a a harness that we can just slide in and out of the tube. Stops it from rattling around. It’s real easy to maintain. So, if I need to change anything or whip it out, all I need to do is pull the shock out, whip out the bottom, fire a new one in. It comes in, we’ve made like a 3D printed harness for it. It’s just super simple. Really easy to put in and out. Yeah. Brad. Yeah. Quite the machine. Yeah. It’s cool, isn’t it? Yeah. It’s nice to work on. Yeah, it’s good. Looks good. Awesome. Well, yeah. Thanks. Good luck, everybody. Cheers. We’re out in front of Scott Pitts, and they definitely have a new bike. It looks like that prototype gambler that we saw some spy shots of earlier. We can’t shoot it up close, but we did manage to sneak a spy shot. Oh, hi. Hi. Shut up. We’re at Intense Factory Racing. We’re here with John Joe Breeden’s mechanic. You guys have been doing a lot over the offse. You got new suspension. Now you’ve got the gearbox on the M1. What can you tell us uh what’s the latest and greatest on this bike? Uh yeah, I suppose the the most obvious thing for for sure is the gearbox and the gates belt drive system that we got on here. our suspension sponsor ext. Um they’re going to send a couple engineers in. They’ve been great support with us so far. Um we’ve done yeah quite a few setup days, testing days and yeah making good progress with that cuz this fork is highly adjustable. You can adjust the positive air chamber volume but also the negative too, right? Yeah. So there is the positive chamber which is adjustable. The negative chamber it’s kind of like a traditional negative chamber. um where it just automatically uh equalizes uh depending on the pressure you set in the main chamber. Um you can add or remove volume reducers to the negative chamber, right? Um and then they also have what they call a plus plus chamber which is some people call it a ramp up. Um it’s kind of like that. I don’t know that. Yeah, it kind of kind of is. It’s like a it’s it’s pretty crazy. It’s not something I’ve ever seen before anyway. The way the suspension curve has like a almost you could say like a step in it. And Joe’s always running these funny bar ends. I would call them bar stops. They were kind of nicknamed the donuts. I don’t know what the real name is for them yet, but he finds he can relax his grip without worrying about his hand coming off the bars. Um or worrying as much. Um, his theory is kind of that as you take an an impact, if your hand wants to come off the bar, it kind of rolls off the bar rather than just coming straight off like this. So, that helps support with that a little bit and just gives it a bit more security. All right, we’re here with Mark in the MS0eroed pits and we’ve got the G3 bike in front of us. Obviously has the gates, belt, and the pinion drive. Anything else you can tell us that’s sort of updated? We’ve just incorporated a bit of a mud guard on the top there. Hope have made us a new pulley wheel. um which is helping keep the belt tension there. Also, we have the new bash plate underneath. So, it’s just about making a few little modifications and a few updates from the racing and testing we’ve already done this year. What have you found that the mass damper does? We started testing the mass dampers earlier this year. Uh we’ve not done as much testing with it as we’d like. Um there’s a lot I mean it’s a very expansive topic and there’s a lot of different situations that you need to test it in. Um, but initially adding a bit of weight to the sprung mass um, helps with small bump sensitivity on the fork. Um, helps reduce feedback in the handlebars. Um, and just helps with traction on the ground really. So, when you’re going over really fast rough bike part stuff, it just reduces feedback through the bars. Um, we found it’s a big improvement in some situations, but obviously adding weight at that point of the bike isn’t ideal. Um, so there’s situations where it it’s maybe not so good. I see all the riders are on uh coil shocks. Uh, this bike is pretty progressive, right? Uh, yeah, it’s um it’s it starts off leverage ratio around about 3.3 um which is actually lower compared to some bikes, but then it very quickly drops to about 2.4 and it it sort of it stays that way for a lot of the travel. So, uh, compared to a lot of bikes, it is very progressive. So, we are running quite a low spring rate compared to a lot of the bikes on you’ll see on the World Cup. Everybody’s on the DH22 tires, it looks like, front and rear. Yeah. Um, does that change very much or? Um, obviously we’ve been with Michelin for quite a few years now. So, we’ve been working on prototype tires with them for a long time. Um, these they’re kind of un unmarked, but this is their latest version that we’re testing. It’s got um just different casing and different rubber based on feedback from last year. Um the 22 is a really versatile tire, so it’s kind of like an all condition tire, so it works well in the dry, but in wet conditions you can also um use it. So, it’s a very versatile tire. Um we’ve got a new rear version of it, which is um it’s still a prototype, but it’s basically designed to roll a bit faster. So, when the conditions are drier, it’s you got bit more rolling speed. Um so another thing hope have brought us this year is uh custom reach caps. Uh so we can adjust reach head angle all independently now. So we can go from anything from zero to plus 7 mil on reach and one to two degrees on the head angle. Gates is putting up €100,000 this weekend for a win. Let’s see if anybody can take that prize purse.