New bikes are go

Last night saw the final Virtue 1 of Felt Racing picked up, along with the uniform for the season, and with a calendar now sorted, Felt Racing is now all systems go!



As the bikes were assembled, GVRaceTech has dismantled all the suspension components to check for alignment and to loctite all the bolts upon re-assembly, to ensure that we don't have any reliablilty issues in the future. Plenty of other modifications go on during this process, but we can't divulge them all, that just wouldn't be right! So needless to say, we get onto some of the best prepared bikes for the season, in the hope of eliminating any potential race ending problems.


Jason last night rode his new Virtue 1 at the Fatties night ride (pictured below)


and it got a great workout. Many of the boys on the ride desired an 'empty out' ride to harden their legs up for the upcoming XC nationals this weekend, so the pace was well and truly on! Jason had this to say this morning...

"Mate, the bike was awesome. I can't believe how fast you can get used to it. The suspension is simply perfect in all settings. At the start, I thought if I had it set max travel front and back I would lose power to the ground but soon realized this isn’t at all true. In all settings, the suspension still feels like a hard tall when peddling which is sweet for climbing. Flipping the Pro Pedal on and off also makes a great difference to 100% efforts, and descending. The think is amazing! The ride characteristic that impressed me the most is the exit speed out of corners (super fast), the suspension simply allows you to exit the corner just as fast as you entered.

All l can say is, I didn’t think you could have that much fun on one bike until now, thumbs up from me and bring on the 2007 season.

So I guess he likes it ;)

Jack and I will be racing at the Dirt Crits tonight so it will be interesting to see what Jack thinks of the bike. Feel free to whip over and have a ride when you see us, the only way to feel the difference is to try it out for yourself.

This weekend is the final weekend for testing and tuning before the Otway Marathon next weekend, hopefully we can all find something in our underdone legs for the race, falling right at the very start of our season. Still, it will be a good opportunity to experience an extended duration on the new bikes, and we can sort out any reliability issues for the enduro season.

Till next time, I'll leave you with a shot of Specialized/Total Rush's James Dickie having a roll around on the bike. I got the camera out and you have never seen a bloke jump off a bike so fast!! The reason was I think he was enjoying it :)




Good luck to everyone attending the Nationals in Canberra this weekend!