Britain’s Biggest Bike Park Set To Double In Size! The MBR Show

Britain’s biggest and most popular bike park is set to double in size with over 30km of new trails, two skills zones, and a second uplift drop-off point, according to plans submitted to the council.

World Cup DH racing is back, and there has already been controversy at the first round in Fort William thanks to Fox Racing’s new Speed Suit RS. But why has it taken this long for racing kit to evolve to this point, and why were skinsuits so inflammatory in the first place?

We’ve also been to Scotland to ride the new YT Tues DH bike, discuss the importance of Shimano’s first E-EDR race win, and we go into all the details about the latest Orbea Rise e-bike.

For more info on the content covered, check out the following links:

BikePark Wales: https://www.mbr.co.uk/news/bikepark-wales-to-double-in-size-with-27-new-trails-stretching-30km-planning-application-shows-438174

Fort William World Cup: https://www.mbr.co.uk/news/vali-holl-and-loic-bruni-triumph-in-first-round-of-the-dh-world-cup-at-fort-william-438146

YT Tues: https://www.mbr.co.uk/news/bike_news/what-no-idler-yt-unveils-the-mk4-tues-ahead-of-the-fort-william-downhill-wc-and-it-looks-just-like-the-old-one-438024

Orbea Rise: https://www.mbr.co.uk/news/orbeas-new-rise-e-bike-gets-advanced-battery-tech-and-a-hardcore-makeover-for-enduro-riding-437882

We may earn a commission when purchasing through affiliate links in this description.

Click here to subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/user/MBRmagazine?sub_confirmation=1

More at:
MBR: http://www.mbr.co.uk/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MBRmagazine
Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbrmagazine
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mbrmagazine/

in the news this month is a potentially huge expansion for the popular trails at Bike Park Wales I go hands on with the new YT downhill bike we’re going to take a look at the latest Trend in clothing that’s making all the difference on the racetrack we’ve got some interesting news from the first round of the EDR and we’re going to talk about Ora’s long awaited update to the lightweight rise so Denny I was at bipart Wells on Friday and to me it looked like they needed to expand the car park not just the trails but what’s what what’s happening there basically looking to double the amount of trail on offer wow so an extra 30 kilm of Trail that’s uh potentially going to be built over the next few years if planning application goes through bipot Wells is looking to expand its offering to kind of families and novices so easier more blue Trails more green Trails green Trails there was talk when I was there was talking about offering like accommodation places to stay was there anything about that in the proposal or I don’t believe so but um you know it’s not just going to help uh the kind of beginner Riders there’s um going to be an extension to the uplift road so instead of just hold on a second Danny MH but there’s no more Hill a very good point does very good point but you’ll know if you get off at the top and you want to ride things like Terry’s belly and root maneuvers you have to Pedal along the flat quite a few minutes so I think the new uh drop off point will just allow you to access those trails directly cut I mean that flat bits fine on like when you’re on your Ural bike or your trail bike but like when we had downhill bikes up there and stuff when you’re pedaling across that with the seat right down and super soft tires it feels like a schlap right yeah and also it’s really quiet over there you know don’t tend to see a lot of riders over there so hopefully that that will make it uh bit busier and maybe they’ll re develop more Trails there one of the other things that they’re going to develop there I believe is also a skills area in the kind of Quarry area near the top so yeah I know that zone yeah y so um so Ian Lots going on I think uh in total on the planning application there’s nine climbing Trails 27 descending trails and two new skills areas well nine climbing trails that tells you just how popular ebikes you got right exactly and and that’s not the only news for for for Mera tid as well uh if I pronounced that right uh a big a big scheme is sort of come to to light recently and there’s plans to build a massive indoor scheme slope right next door to Bart Wales on the same Hill think we could share the lift well if it’s weather’s bad maybe they can put some drag lift drag lift I know I don’t maybe I’d rather go go my ebike to the top than go on a drag lift but uh there’s going to be a massive Hotel complex Woodland lodges uh indoor water park Outdoor Adventure it’s massive if it if it goes ahead uh and hopefully that brings more people into mountain bike and into the bike park too cuz they’ll be there and hey we could also go riding exactly like a whole holiday destination excellent move over morine so Al you’ve been to Scotland to ride the new YT tuz downhill B right so uh I’m guessing you took it to Fort William yeah absolutely not so like let’s backtrack here a little bit that was pretty smart on yt’s part because I actually went to the launch of tre session 10 at Fort William I don’t know 15 years ago I remember yeah and I all I remember from that experience was that I couldn’t not get down the track in one run I basically I’d stop two or three times every run to shake my hands out so I’m when when they said we’re going to Scotland to do the the YT chz Marv launch I was just like oh my Lord I hope it isn’t I hope it isn’t Fort William so utmost respect to all the World Cup racers that race at Fort William because that is one gnarly track yeah yeah the new bite looks really like the old bite we tested last year earlier this year the kind of format the layout it’s really really similar and really what they’ve done is they’ve done two clever things they’ve added in adjustability so you can put head you can put reach adjust cups in it’s got some chain stay length adjustment so you’ve got like five M chain stay length adjustment you got BB height adjustment so you can kind of tweak tweak the geometry of the bike way more than than the original bike but they’ve just got one frame now that dos both wheel sizes so previously you had a 275 bike or a 29 bike and when we test it we said one thing that’s missing is the MX Spike now you have basically one frame that can be converted between 29 full 29 or MX that’s smart yeah I mean we see most brands go in that direction absolutely how do they do that well it’s really simple right they take the they take the shock link they they’re call it the flip link so you’ve got a flip chip for changing the BB height and the head angle but basically if you take the it’s kind of like two halves of The Rocker link if you just take them off and flip them over that corrects the Geo for the 27.5 in rear wheel or the 29 so you don’t need any extra parts or anything no comes basically it’s one frame five was really cool to it’s now like the 20 you can have full 29 five sizes or you can have MX and five sizes where previously you can only have three sizes on the 29er oh a that’s a big Improvement yeah yeah totally I mean it’s it’s all the options that you’d expect on a modern downhall bike but they haven’t deviated far from what they had before because I mean let’s face it they had a World Cup winning platform pricing is actually the same as before too there models it’s core currently it’s a core 4 and it’s Core 2 The Core 2 is$ 3999 and the core four is the top end bite with Fox Factory suspension and that’s $ 5999 so same price as the bitee we tested last year oh cool and I quite like the fact that it looks the same because if if you have an old T you’re not going to feel like oh I’m like totally out of dat totally and also like I like if they’ come with a whole new platform what happens a lot of times when people design a new bike they fix some problems and they introduce some new ones yeah what what yt’s done is kind of fixed the kind of little niggles like not having any adjustment and just going well hey look there here’s a step Improvement on the bike we currently had which I think is really smart so so how did it ride was it good yeah it’s rides like the old bike I’ve only ridden it with full 29 so I’m going to get the bike um I’m also going to get a 275 rear wheel so I can play between the 29 275 option I did buzz buzz my ass a couple of times in in just some steep sections um so like I’m looking forward to trying it with a smaller rear wheel just on those steeper tracks to see if to see if it gives me more freedom to move on the bike so while we’re on the subject of Fort William and Downhill Racing um one of the big talking points from the first round of the World Cup was clothing fashion fashion and Fort Williams no stranger to controversy when it comes to clothing and particularly tight clothing right so skit fox has a new uh speed Su RS out which was been warned by by all their sponsored athletes so I first saw on my on my social feed from Motocross and I think it’s kind of funny that that mountain bikers have always kind of had an inferiority complex without Motocross and they’ve always wanted to be lots of downhill Racers want to be Motocross Riders so I think the fashion from Motorsport from Motocross has always been in mountain biking right I mean look at the fox the Troy Le kits the baggy pants that was on SE Palmer wasn’t it yeah that was on Motocross kit right and I think it’s kind of I what I think is really interesting about it is that there’s kind of the skin suit band all the top Racers wear really tight clothing anyway so the fact that someone’s brought out like an even tighter like two-piece kind of like Arrow kit I mean it’s just an evolution of what what they currently have so yeah I was talking to the the guy from specialized clothing who um you know he’s done a lot of wind tunnel testing with the team with ly and Finn and Jordan and he was saying that there is you know race winning margins worth of uh you know Advantage there absolutely now back in 2008 when skin suit Band came in we were talking about five six seven seconds on a specific track Danny I mean on last year’s World Cup feed on the live feed Cedric was talking about a skin suit fabric that they tested that gave that they said was six seconds faster I mean that’s that’s an insane amount of time right yeah and one of the other things we were just talking about earlier as well uh kind of point about when they introduced the skin suit band is that um there’s a commercial element to this absolutely totally py had his own Royal clothing business like Minar always had O’Neal Fox Troy Lee they could sell Motocross kit to mountain bikers yeah whereas no one’s going to buy a skin suit exactly time I’m pretty crazy buy even to buy a Motocross kit right because it’s just not designed for purpose and I think I think what’s really happened is modern mountain bike clothing is modern mountain bike clothing yeah that’s really we’ve got clothing that’s fit for purpose that’s practical yeah I mean it makes total sense doesn’t it cuz every sport that involves speed uh is all about aerodynamics absolutely yeah so it’s in fact it’s crazy when you think that they were baggy clothes yeah Tak this long to yeah totally yeah so let’s go from Downhill Racing to Enduro racing right and um e EDR and EDR yeah I think that’s what it’s called or is it called inur World Cup I mean I prefer to call it inur world cup seems to make more sense and then do we call it e inur World Cup for the ebite version like I’m really confus anyway okay like they racing we’ll let them sort the name out right but what happened um so we just had the first round of the E EDR and the EDR in Finale this weekend and Yeti won both in’s yeah yeah in the men’s so Richie Roode on a sb60 almost the bike we have behind us almost the bik we have behind us and Ryan Gilchrist on the e160 yep amazing right Y and what’s amazing about that it’s shimano’s first overall race win wow so yeah that’s I don’t know how long EDR has been going for but it’s got to be like three years or something isn’t it at least at least and for such a major manufacturer yeah I mean obviously they were working on that last year like Gilchrist he won a couple of power stages so which which basically made everybody’s head turn CU like how’s he doing that Shimano B because there was an in joke within uro electric uro race and that I was the highest Place Shimano Rider cuz you knew were the disadvantage so clearly you were no longer the disadvantage if you’re riding a Shimano motor yeah and from what I understand Shimano has had kind of technicians at all Races just constantly evolving and developing the motor and not the motor but the software around it and the firmware tuning it yeah basically tuning the motor yeah I imagine the hardware is the same as what you get on the production bike it’s literally just a firmware or software update yeah which is really really cool isn’t it yeah so another bike that uh that uses that Shimano motor in quite a novel way is the or rise yeah yeah uh and they were one of the first and probably one of the most popular kind of diet ebikes yeah they were definitely one of the early adopters of like the lightweight ebike theme but so they were a slight disadvantage because they use a full power motor which is always going to be heavier than a dedicated lightweight motor but lots of these lightweight bikes now have got increasingly more torque increasingly more power so they’re almost coming back up to like sort of almost full power they’re still lighter than full power motors so I think with the rise is this I think this is true Jenny that that motor has to be87 of a kilo heavier than a dedicated lightweight motor yeah I think it’s almost a kilo from compared to some obviously the TQ there’s a bigger difference and then I think to the like the Bosch SX it’s roughly a kilo yeah so there so there’s definitely there’s so they have a weight disadvantage but what it allows them to do is run it as a full powerered motor on a lightweight bike yeah but the so the first it ation of the rise uh which came out in 2020 that is a detuned shimo ep8 so you were restricted uh the new rise they’ve taken that away turned up the wick and two modes two modes you got the you got RS plus RS plus takes you to full 85 newton meters and then the RS mode is around 50 to 60 50 yeah it’s 54 I think it’s 54 and but it’s not just the the kind of headline Figures it’s the Cadence that you need to achieve those figures so on the RS plus you can get the full 85 at less than uh 50 rpm so really quite slow quite torky yeah so on on steep climbs you’ve got power there when you when you need it and then if you use the the the RS kind of more economy mode then you tend to want to spin they they want you to be using 70 to 90 RP more like more like on a regular bike so Shimano offers a kind of profile one profile two on it Motors so that that’s that’s basically the now the new RS and rs plus modes and you can toggle between those very quickly so if you come to a section where you think hey look I need all I need full beans here you can literally switch modes there you go switch profiles switch motor profiles exactly really clever that’s really cool but they’ve also um split the platform right in the same way that white has the elite 140 and the elite 150 what’s so bad then yeah so the so the SL is kind of super light that’s 140 140 so front and rear uh and then you have the LT which is 160 front 150 rear the shock yo and the shock changes shock stroke changes and then the fork as well so okay that’s how you get the extra travel but also that changes the geometry as well uh and on the LT version obviously you have more aggressive geometry you also have a flip chip or adjustable geometry as well whereas on the SL it’s fixed I also I also like what they’ve done with the battery options it’s really cool right yeah so you got the split in travel and uh kind of Geo and intended use and then you’ve got split for the batteries so you’ve got a 420w lightweight internal battery or 630 W uh longer range uh battery so and they’re both internal both internal you get two internal battery options basically go they’ll go in the same frame exactly yeah and obviously there’s a weight difference between the two and then you have a a 2110 range extender as well which you can use with either of the internal battery options yeah so by by my calculations I haven’t stuck anything on the scales it should come in um the top of the range LT with the coil shock with the range extender and the big internal battery at just under 20 kilos oh wow that’s impressive right yes I think the I think the bikes come as standard with the 630 W battery and then if you select the smaller one you get a bit of money off cash back yeah so that rounds out the show um hope you enjoyed it thanks for watching and let us know what you think about all this new tight clothing that’s coming into racing would you be confident enough to wear a skin suit let us know in the comments below