In terms of DH application of this theory it demands a balancing point to be achieved with rider preference there is too wide and too narrow. Yes a wider rim means a flatter profile. And yes that gives you good straight line traction. BUT it doesn't always mean better cornering traction. At high speed you will do 2 things when leaning a bike in to a turn with a tire that has a flat lateral profile. 1 you will have a reduced range of angle in relationship to to the surface the tire is on do to the flatter profile having less roll. Now for those of you who would say well i doubt many people achieve that kind of lean in a corner well fine there is my 2nd point to come. 2 With a flatter profile the tire will break traction much harsher under hard cornering because its like winding up a spring. with the "improved" traction at a now more limited angle of attack you are going to break traction latter once you have built up more energy in the side wall of the tire which makes it a less predictable and much harsher break-away-point. With all that said there is a reason that Dirt Bikes have a rounded profiles to there tires and they have offroad racing history all the way back to the 60's. Do they really think they have figured something out that motocross hasn't already.

Some of the comments about how much lower the price of other WC level rigs are i totally agree with but there is no way to effectively bring down the price of this bike. The problem with its price tag doesn't fall on the small Components it falls on just 3 things: the frame, shock, and fork. Both suspension pieces are unique to this bike and there for made in small batches increasing cost. The fork and shock have custom valving and the fork has an adjustable air assist that no other 40 will have during 2012. And the frame is $4200 alone. Suggesting that downgrading the brakes and so on would make a big enough dent to bring it down to $6500 is silly. They buy those components in bulk and included them into a complete bike's price tag at a huge discount. if you were to downgrade all the small stuff outside of the big 3 pieces i mentioned you would only be looking at $1000 savings at the absolute most. I just don't see this bike getting cheaper unless the air assist in the 40 becomes standard in all Fox 40's and the price tag for the frame is lowered. The rear shock is probably the only reasonably priced custom component for this bike (lots of manufactures do go that route). To give you a comparison take the Demo II at 6600 complete wc build and a frame only price of $2650. When you do the math you are getting the brakes and so on at the same price point as other manufactures.

I give them mad Props and they have to have huge nuts to do it but if the way the jump is set up in the photo is how they plan on doing it I don't think its nearly as impressive as previous distance records. Before i get negative 5000 on this hear me out. A lot of records are recorded by where the rider or driver lands and not the lip to landing distance. So go back to other jumps made, take the redbull tour of Australia back in NWD 5 i believe (the year before Nathan Rennie set his record). With no prep they took a moto ramp, that was super steep built for tricking, in someone's back lot lined it up with a dirt landing that was under 25feet long and reached out to something like the 80 foot mark. that takes precision and balls. you only get a 5 foot margin of error on the landing. here they have what looks to be out to 60 feet from the top of the landing before they land to flat and the top of the landing in the photo sits before even the BMX record mark at about 100 feet. Not saying i would do it, not saying its not impressive, but i am saying the records made before will remain more impressive to me even if they do in fact set a new one here.

Its always hard to get suspension just right. In this case I think the solution would have been to turn in the bottom out adjust to make the chamber smaller then set the pressure to same as it was with the the previous, more open, chamber position that had nice small bump/beginning-stroke compliance. Reasoning for this is that if you have the same air pressure but a smaller chamber your more likely to maintain the initial stroke feel but have a firmer and faster ramp up at the end of the stroke. Not claiming to solve there problem with setting it up completely but if your trying to improve end stroke without having negative effects on the beginning stroke feel its a good place to start. I would personally disagree with increasing high speed compression and adding more air to the shock. those 2 setting changes target both the beginning and ending instead of targeting the problem directly. I would add though you may have ultimately needed to add air pressure depending how easily you were bottoming out. However the simplest way to address the problem on the trail would have been to add a click or 2 of low speed compression. From the problem described the high speed compression should have been a last resort choice for addressing the problem.

Actually i bet you could make that shock work with that frame a lot better if there was a air volume spacer installed and the air pressure reduced by roughly 10 PSI. You would get a lot more small bump compliance and it would ramp up before bottoming out.

I noticed it too but i think you got to take in account for rider set up. Also another factor is the choice in air shock. I've used a lot of different shocks and One of things I've noticed with air shocks, if you don't have adjustable bottom out volume and pressure, getting enough sag without always bottoming out is a real pain in the ass especially on none floating pivot bikes like 4 bar and single pivots.

they probably stayed in whistler for all of crankworx. they did compete in some of the mid-week events like the Garbanzo DH.