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Interbike '05: A fine day in the desert with speedy mechanics and a 40-pound bike

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The Santa Cruz VP Free

Cannondale's Dalton flies through repairs

The 2005 Interbike show kicked off with a warm, cloudless day over the rocky, serpentine singletrack trails of Bootleg Canyon above Lake Mead. The venue has a short section of closed, divided paved road for road-bike testing and a vast area riddled with interesting singletrack for testing mountain bikes. The trail system offers so much mileage that, despite the large crowds at this well-attended Outdoor Demo, many of the nicest trails I had almost completely to myself all afternoon.

Ah, the freedom
A revelation for me was riding the Santa Cruz VP Free, the company’s all-out freeride bike. With 8.5 inches of rear travel and a 203mm-travel (eight-inch) Marzocchi Bomber 888RC double-crown fork on it, I figured I would be using the shuttle to take the massive XL-size bike to the top of the mountain. But no! I rode it up a technical singletrack trail to the top, and then I could not get enough of it on an even more technical singletrack descent and ended up riding up and down some more trails.

Of course, you have to be a bit more patient riding a 40-pound bike (38 pounds in a medium size) to the top of a mountain than a 20-pound one, but the traction and feel of this bike still make it fun to climb with. The eight-plus inches of travel, deep sag, and huge Kenda Stick E Kinetics 26X2.6 square-block-tread tires turned out to be anything but a liability climbing up over rock shelves, dips, and steep, loose dirt. Santa Cruz’s Virtual Pivot Point suspension features a broad, “cassette” link just behind and under the bottom bracket that is pushed forward by the chain tension, providing a lifting force on the bottom bracket countering the down force on the pedal, so the rider has no sensation of his pedaling energy being wasted in bobbing up and down. And since the suspension is not affected by pedaling, yet is free to react to bumps during pedaling, it can work well with lots of sag. This bike was set up with about a third of the travel used up in sag, which gives the rider an incredible cushion to float on that also keeps the tires on the ground, biting for traction, as the bike drops in and out of sharp dips, and those big, soft tires get a lot of bite, enabling climbing some really steep, technical stuff.

This bike is also very rideable on a wide range of terrain because it does not have an interrupted seat tube or a pivot in the way of mounting a front derailleur. Even on an XL, with my 38-inch leg length, I need a lot of seatpost out, and this one accepts a very big, long post. There is no comparison between the VP Free and an interrupted-seat-tube freeride bike where you only can get a couple of inches of seatpost adjustment (because pushing it down more brings the end of the post in contact with the rear shock, and raising it more does not leave enough seatpost in the short little seat tube). A couple of inches of seat-height adjustment range is hardly sufficient for a single rider with his seatpost cut to length just for him, much less enough to allow anyone with a different leg length to use the bike. And the VP Free has plenty of room on the seat tube to accept a front derailleur; this one was set up with two chainrings and a bash guard, but it could just as easily be set up with a triple.

Santa Cruz says that some riders use the VP Free as their only bike and lighten it up by using a Fox DHX air shock (instead of the standard Fox DHX 5.0 coil shock, saving 3/4 of a pound) and a 165mm-travel Fox single-crown fork.

Maverick
The 5-inch-rear-travel, six-inch-front-travel Maverick ML 7.5 is a really fun, light, nimble bike that climbs easily and efficiently and still offers a lot of travel to get you through rough stuff. I found it easy to maneuver through tight spots and around rocky ledges, yet it could take some fast drops off of rocks or into and through abrupt dips so common on the Bootleg Canyon trails.

The 7.5

The ML 7.5 goes beyond the ML 7, Maverick’s original flagship bike, by offering an inch more travel, stiffening the down tube with a big, formed monocoque down tube, and taking weight out while tightening up the rear end by welding the seatstays directly to the shock (the shock is of course machined inside for its internal mechanism after welding).

Maverick’s design has an up-and-back travel path for the rear wheel called “Parallel Path” since it approximately parallels the path of the front wheel (in the Maverick DUC 32 or optional single-crown, 4.25-inch travel) fork. With the bottom bracket built into the large, hollow swinging link, there is very little chain growth as the rear wheel moves up and back, making it pedal very nicely while absorbing bumps smoothly. And the two-to-one shock leverage ratio keeps it working in a range that is easily widened for heavier riders who would otherwise be near the limits of a shock using a three-to-one leverage ratio. The ML 8 model uses the same shock (also welded to the seatstays) and the same leverage ratio yet gets another inch of rear travel by moving the mounting point of the shock’s top eyelet forward on the frame.

A unique Maverick innovation is an adjustable hydraulic seatpost (not a suspension post, mind you!). The SpeedBall seatpost has a lever under the saddle that allows the seatpost to smoothly move up (with air pressure pushing it) or down when the rider pushes the lever, just like the height adjustment on an office chair. It could not be smoother or easier to change the seat height, and the 80mm of adjustment is enough to preclude the need for every loosening the seat binder to get down a steep drop.

Finally, a cool feature sure to be much in demand soon due to the rising demand for 29-inch-wheel bikes is the ability to use either of Maverick’s standard upside-down forks with the bigger wheel size. Maverick offers a couple of spool-shaped travel-reducing inserts (with instructions) that can easily be dropped into the fork legs to prevent the 29-inch wheel from hitting the crown. That’s it. You lose an inch or so of travel but still have a light, stiff fork with either five inches (double crown) or 3.5 inches (single crown) of travel. Of course, then you have to build a wheel onto a Maverick 24-7 hub, since the forks accept a 24mm (rather than 20mm) through-axle.

Fastest Wrench in the West
Park Tool’s Fastest Wrench in the West competition is in full swing once again at the Outdoor Demo, with speedy mechanics lining up to try their hand at winning honor and free tools. After hitting a big red start button, mechanics this year must remove a left pedal and install a new one, remove a right crankarm and install a new one, and remove a master-link chain and install a new one, hitting the red button again to stop the clock once the drivetrain is back in adjustment.

Doug Dalton and Ted Cituk, Cannondale mechanics stationed just across the aisle from Park, could not withstand the lure of the task any more and raced head-to-head, with Dalton narrowly defeating Cituk by two seconds, 2:10 to 2:12, both close to the elusive sub-two-minute barrier only a couple of mechanics managed to surpass on Day 1. The 1:42 leading the competition was well out of reach, though.

Tip of the show
From former world downhill champion Greg “Hairball” (or “HB”) Herbold, talking about life in Las Vegas’s giant hotels: “As soon as you get to your floor, look for the stairways and exits, and as soon as you get into your room, read the sign on the back of the door that tells you which way to run in an emergency.”