Doing This Will Ruin Your Bike!

If you copy a World Cup XC pros bike setup detail for detail, you'll accomplish two things. Save 40 g and absolutely ruin your ride. The fastest cross country bike setup on paper might just be the worst bike you ever ride. Engineered for a 90-minute win or bust effort by the World Cup pros, they're

not exactly engineered for us mortals. Worldclass pros have a team of mechanics to service their bikes every single night. whereas we don't. If we get a flat tire three miles into our rides, well, we've got to sort that ourselves. We haven't got a team looking after us like Nino Sherwood would. >> So, today we're going to separate

legitimate performance tech from absolute lightweight madness. We're looking at prolevel speed tailored [music] for real world trail riding to help you find your ultimate XC bike setup. [music]

Okay, Adam, before we go too far, what actually defines a cross country race bike? >> Well, for the last few seasons, we've seen this sort of bike equipped with between 100 and 120 mil of rear wheel travel accompanied with a 120 fork. And they've also got much slacker and progressive geometry now than they ever

have before with slacker head tube angles, longer wheelbase, all in the aim of aiding descending and with build kits that wouldn't look too dissimilar on a trail bike a few years ago with four piston brakes and ultimately dropper posts coming as standard. Now, this has all come about out of necessity. [music] So, the World Cup race courses have got

far more technical and far more gnarly because before this XC bikes did look quite different. think hard tails, 100 mil travel fork and rigid seat posts. >> Yeah. And that was all to be as light as possible. And to be honest, with the bikes they were on, the descents they were doing were probably just as gnarly