Bikes & Big Ideas

There are a lot of smart people working in bike suspension, but EXT founder Franco Fratton might have the most impressive resume — which includes working for the Ferrari and Lotus Formula One teams. …

Martin Maes practically grew up in the GT pits with his father, and had raced for them since he was a teenager. But he made the move to Orbea for 2022, and so we sat down to chat about his career tra…

Yoann Barelli just announced the formation of his Into The Gnar Progression Team  — so we got him back on Bikes & Big Ideas to talk about it. And along the way we talk about Yoann’s career shift into…

Push Industries is one of the best-known suspension tuners and manufacturers of high-end shocks out there, and their founder, Darren Murphy has a whole lot to say on the topic of suspension. And so w…

Mountain bike suspension has improved immensely in recent years, but designing rear suspension kinematics is inherently a game of tradeoffs, with no ideal one-size-fits-all solution. Cascade Componen…

Joe McEwan had a career as an aerospace engineer working with composites, but when he started building bikes, steel was his material of choice. So we sat down with the founder of Starling Cycles to g…

Ed Masters often looks like he’s having more fun than anybody else on the EWS and World Cup DH circuits, but that belies just how seriously he takes racing at the top level, and how much thought he’s…

Katy Winton has reliably been one of the top contenders on the EWS circuit, but she found herself without a factory ride in 2021 and had to put together her own team at the 11th hour to keep racing. …

RockShox announced their new Flight Attendant electronically-controlled suspension system a few months ago, so we brought Chris Mandell back on Bikes & Big Ideas to tell us all about what the system …

BMC has a strong heritage in road and cross country bikes but isn’t as well known for gravity-focused offerings. Mariano Schoefer and Christof Bigler — an engineer and designer, respectively, at BMC …

Neko Mulally has had a very successful career racing for some of the biggest teams on the World Cup circuit, so we were surprised — and excited — when he announced that he was launching his own team …

2021 was Blister’s busiest year ever for testing mountain bikes and gear, and there were some real standout products among that crop. So we rounded up a bunch of our reviewers to give a rundown of th…

Guerrilla Gravity just celebrated their 10th anniversary, so we sat down with co-founders Will Montague and Matt Giaraffa to talk about what inspired them to start a bike company in the first place; …

Clipless vs. flat pedals is a hotly debated topic in the mountain bike world, but now there’s a third choice — Hustle Labs’ Avery magnetic pedals. We were, frankly, a bit skeptical about this new in-…

Cannondale has a long history of doing things their own, quirky way, and the last couple of bikes they’ve rolled out — the Jekyll and Scalpel HT — are no exception. So this week, we’re joined by Cann…

We’ve been testing a ton of bikes, and have a whole lot of updates to share, so Jonathan Ellsworth and David Golay sat down to discuss all of it. We get into it about high-pivot Enduro bike compariso…

Mountain bike derailleur drivetrains haven’t fundamentally changed for just about as long as there have been mountain bikes — until now, anyway. Cedric Eveleigh has a very promising idea for how to r…

Mic Williams was racing as a privateer when Covid hit and racing went on hold. But instead of binging Netflix, he used his free time to start a very unusual bike company — Williams Racing Products. M…

Jordi Cortes spends much of the year on the road, working with Fox’s top racers on their suspension setups, and that has left him with both a wealth of knowledge about suspension setup and a unique p…

Sealant-based tubeless systems are now ubiquitous on mountain bikes, but how did we get here? We sat down with Mike Bush, the President of Stan’s, to talk about the early days of tubeless development…