Nico Vouilloz was called the Alien back in the day because he rode like no other. Calculated, calm and super duper fast!! I saw him at a World Cup in Squaw Valley California and he was practicing the DH on a hard tail going balls out, on a course that most people were having a hard time with a long travel full suspension bike. I heard of his training sessions and they were amazing, him and his father would go out to a track and time certain corners over and over again seeing how fast he could do it. He would do it for hours, everytime getting faster and faster seeing how much he could push himself and the bike. Well check out the pictures of his bike. This was his own bike and his own company, when his sponsorships dried up for whatever reason he decided to go out on his own using BOS engineering to set up his bike. Those were the guys who designed the SUNN bikes which I think to this day have more WC and World Champ wins than any other bike out there. Maybe Sam Hill will change that on the Sunday but not yet he has about 14 world champs and who knows how many WC wins to go before that can happen. but I digress, check out the bike with the telemetry box on the top tube, Yes just like F1 race cars, he could see exactly how fast he was going in each section, when he was braking, how the suspension was reacting to the terrain! think of the advantage he had with this, no doubt he was the most talented DH racer around but he had even more help with the technology, and he was smart enough to know how to use this information to ride to the absolute edge. I still drool over this bike and wish I could obtain it someday just to ride and admire what a piece of moving art it is.
move out of the way. Early in the day for practice is OK but later in the day people just want to get some full speed runs in and that just messes with your timing. So spread the word and learn some race etiquette, if you are stopping to check a section out make sure no one is coming and if they are move out of the way as quickly as possible because people can get hurt otherwise. OK rant over.
ort rain shower at the start of the finals. Lars Sternberg was on another level with the way he was flying through the course I don't know how he was getting traction in some of those corners! Joe Perrizo showed up to race on his Atomlab hardtail dirt jumper and made the cut of 16, his prize for qualifying was a first round matchup with Lars and sorry to say I don't think anyone had a chance against him this weekend. Aaron Nactrab was looking smooth and fast in his heats but a crash out in the 3 round ended his day early, I think he could have made it to the semis the way he was running.
The first full suspension bike I ever bought was this beauty! I origianlly had ProForx with a super long travel 3" of travel! then I upgraded to the Manitou EFC which had the breakthrough technology of Elastomers with oil damping, boy those were the days! I remember at the National at Mt. Snow in '96 I had Manitou put the new Mach5 internals in the fork which made the fork super plush with MCU elastomers. Check out the long stem and high seatpost and the great Magura HS-22 that were way too strong for any bike in the day and flexed the hell out of the chainstays, even with the brace. Thank God that disc brakes weren't too far off in the future because rim brakes suck!
