How to Adjust Downhill Mountain Bikes for Racing

Video Transcript

"MICKEY DENONCOURT: The change of like it's more set up for traditional cross country or trail riding is something that's more suited and more specific to downhill riding. The first fundamental changes you want to make the bike work better or the way the cockpit's set up. You're going to want your seat to be considerably lower, I mean, pretty much as low as it goes, so just get it out of the way. So if you have like a quick release seat collar, you just slam your seat down or if you need-if you have an interrupted seat tube you might have to get a shorter seat post or cut off the seat post that you have to get your seat lower. But for stand over clearance so you can move around the bike and change your center of gravity. The next big thing, equally important, most bikes these days have riser handle bars as opposed to the flat handle bars that bikes were come with a few years ago but a shorter handle bar stem is generally going to help the way the bike handles in situations where you're doing downhill riding or free riding because it's easier to unweight the front wheel of the bike then loft it over obstacles. The shorter stem basically focuses--like forces you to lower you overall center of gravity to get more stability and closer to the ground. Making these changes to a bike that you're not using for more extreme riding makes the bike ride not as well. Other things that you need to do as you do things more seriously, you need to change your tires out from XC tires which are thinner, lighter, harder rubber to something with a thicker casing, a softer rubber that's going to resist flats and get more traction at the expense of rolling resistance and climbing ability. Then probably the last thing but something that's very important is making sure when you get serious about this, that you have someway of keeping your chain on your bike, this one's called a chain retention system or chain guide. So these series of rollers and plates here keeps my chain on my chain ring so it doesn't derail. And obviously, if you expect your chain to be there and you got to pedal and it's not there, there's going to be some nasty consequences. So that, maybe changing from a binding style retention pedal to a flat pedal if you're--if the conditions warrant it or if your riding style warrants it, that's another thing to do. So these are all just slight little tweaks that help you get your setup dialed for downhill riding."