Video: Seth // Words: Daniel
A lot of us don’t think twice about riding down a ramp or section of trail with a little bit of grade to it. But what if you had to come to a complete stop on it? Could you do it? We wanted to find out how hard it was to stop at what angle, so we built a ramp.
Now, this experiment was somewhat unscientific — we realize that multiple competing factors at play could influence how steep the angle that we could stop at actually was. For instance, surface, rider skill, bike choice, tire air pressure, suspension air pressure, tire compound, brakes, rider height, varying weather conditions, rider fatigue, initial speed, bottom bracket clearance on the roll-over, etc. However, variables aside, this all translates well into multiple scenarios, and Seth had a deep curiosity he wanted to satisfy…so we got to work on the ramp.
To account for one variable, we had three different riders on three different bikes. More of an XC bike, a full-on trail bike, and a downhill bike. These bikes have different geometries, with the downhill bike being the longest, lowest, slackest, and best for steep terrain.
