With the Tour de France wrapped up it is possible to make the math on this season's UCI rankings and the growing trend of UAE Team Emirates' dominance may have reached a peak. After finishing first, fourth and sixth in the Grand Boucle, the team officially has over double the points of the team that...

Registration for the 2025 Unbound Gravel will open on Friday, November 1, 2024, and close two weeks later, on November 15. Lottery winners will be announced on November 21, 2024.

The Olympic Games time-trial event will take place this Saturday with the likes of Remco Evenepoel, Filippo Ganna and Joshua Tarling fighting for the gold medal. Among the quality startlist racing in Paris will be a lot of quality riders but not Colombia's representative. Daniel Martnez has not man...

Spotted, tucked into a corner at Eurobike, was this slick aluminum Intense M1 Pinion DH prototype sporting a gearbox and their latest Smart.Shift electronic shifting. Now, Intense already has a recently updated M1 DH bike with a new high-pivot, 6-bar adjustable travel suspension design thats been proven by their Factory Racing team on the DH World Cup circuit. So, what is there to gain by recreating that bike with an electric shift gearbox and a belt drive?Besides a 100,000 reward from Gates a lot of performance benefits, too!Would you ever think of automatic shifting on a DH race bike?Intense M1 DH electric shift gearbox mountain bike prototype(Photos/Cory Benson)We often hear about the low maintenance benefits of gearboxes and belt drives. But there are fewer real deep dives into the true racing benefits of such a setup, as well. Gates has certainly sparked some good discussion with their offer of a 100k bonus purpse to the first Elite DH World Cup win on a Gates belt-drive mountain bike. And Gamux Factory Racing with their production Sego have gotten a good head start.But count this high-pivot Intense M1 Pinion prototype gearbox DH bike as further proof that a gearbox may be able to help you go faster in the type of races where a fraction of a second makes all the difference in the world. Better weight distribution. Reduced unsprung mass. Lower center of gravity. No vulnerable derailleur to bash against the rocks.Whats new, turning a World Cup DH bike into a gearbox bike?Its no simple or cheap project to design, develop, and build a World Cup DH racing prototype. But Intese is all-in.It certainly helps that their latest World Cup DH race bike the M1 is already made of more-prototyping-friendly 6061-T6 aluminum. And it doesnt hurt that it recently got a complete high-pivot, idler pulley, 6-bar suspension update that lends itself well to strapping a gearbox underneath.To make that work, Intense really only needed to reshape its chainstays and rebuild an all-new bottom bracket cluster to house the Pinion. Effectively, it looks like all of the suspension linkages and much of the shock tunnel carry over. And Intense keeps the seatstays, toptube, headtube, and most of the downtube from the regular M1, too.Still, creating the new bottom end for Intenses M1 Pinion DH gearbox prototype was no easy feat. So, Intense turned to the German rapid prototyping experts of Trumpf to 3D-print a number of elements in weldable alloy to complete this project bike, and hang a Pinion gearbox off it.Then, of course, they had to create a new Gates centerline-compatible idler pulley for it, and rig the Gates tensioner pulley off the motor to keep belt tension through 202-212mm of rear wheel travel.Pinion C1.6i 6-speed electronic Smart.Shift gearboxInterestingly, most performance-focused gearbox bikers are usually trying to get the most gears and the biggest gearing range possible. But in DH racing where special 7-speed derailleur systems already abound, Intense opted for the simpler and lighter C1.6i 6-speed gearbox.The magnesium casing C1.6i still gives the Intense M1 Pinion prototype gearbox DH bike a wide-enough 295% gearing range. Plus, its almost 15% lighter than the 12-speed version, and a claimed 1800g for the regular gearbox. But that little i also means that this is an electronic shift Smart.Shift version. This adds back some weight with an internal battery and electronic actuator but replaces the sometimes sluggish feel of the Pinion twist-shifter with a push-button electric trigger shifter. It also means that Pinion times your shift to the dead spot in your pedal rotation if you are pedaling. So, you can shift under load better than ever (as much as a gearbox can ever really be shifted under load).The entire gearbox setup gives this Intense M1 Pinion DH prototype an incredibly clean and simple rear end, with no derailleur to worry about. And also you still get to choose your desired hub, like this fast-engaging Onyx.One more thingPinion actually debuted their electronic Smart.Shift shifting system a couple of summers ago on bikes, where it could plug into their big onboard batteries. And they could be configured for some automatic shifting functions too along the same lines as the Shimano eMTB-specifc AutoShift & FreeShift modes weve tested, but here since the gearbox can shift even when you are not pedaling it could apply to regular bikes, as well.Pre.Select would automatically shift you into an ideal gear based on speed as you coast, and Smart.Select would automatically shift to a preset gear for starting from a stop. Neither of those really made it to any pedal-powered bike because you needed a speed sensor to make it work.But do you see that wire running on the inside of the non-driveside chainstay (above)? We dont know why that would be there, unless it was a speed sensor.So it looks to us like Intense created their M1 DH race prototype, not with only electronic gearbox shifting, but automatic Pinion Smart.Shift gearbox shifting. We can really see that Pre.Select function coming in handy for certain racetracks, where a racer could program it to automatically have the perfect gear set to attack out of a super technical section, letting them concentrate on controlling the movement of the bike.Intense says only, Were true to our core values, constantly evolving, pushing boundaries, and developing our bikes. Bringing automatic gearbox shifting to the DH World Cup sounds like pushing boundaries to us tooIntenseCycles.comThe post Intense M1 Pinion Prototype Teases Gearbox DH Bike Future of Electronic & Auto Shifts appeared first on Bikerumor.

This post compares cycling and obesity rates in 8 major countries. This comparison shows encouraging results. It seems that the more people cycle, the less likely they are to be fat. There is a clear connection between cycling and obesity, as we can see if we look at international statistics and research.The post Does Cycling Reduce Obesity? Comparing Rates of Obesity and Cycling in 8 Major Countries appeared first on Average Joe Cyclist.

Jan Tratnik has been a good part of Team Visma | Lease a Bike's plans for the Tour de France and has concluded the three weeks, after doing the same at the Giro d'Italia. Although he did not achieve the same results as Tadej Pogacar, he's done the same calendar and will fill in for the Slovenian nat...

Luke Lamperti is one of the riders Soudal - Quick-Step signed into the 2024 season, looking to bolster it's squad with young talents. The American sprinter had already proven himself as a quality rider earlier in the year but has won for the first time in the team today on the opening stage of the C...

Cycling's essence comes a lot from how much fans can interact with the riders, on and off the road. Tadej Pogacar won the Giro d'Italia back in May, a very dominant and popular win, made extra special for extra gestures such as the bidon he took from a soigneur on Monte Grappa (stage 20) and immedia...

Tadej Pogacar is the big absence from the Paris Olympic Games. Part of that is because of the Slovenian national team's decision to not take his fiance Urska Zigart to the races. The decision has blown up in the face of the officials that also lack reigning time-trial champion Primoz Roglic... And...

Will Pidders do the double? And who will follow in Neff's footsteps as women's Olympic champion?Haley Batten performs at UCI XCO World Cup in Val di Sole, Italy on September 04, 2022 // Bartek Wolinski / Red Bull Content Pool // SI202209040730 // Usage for editorial use only //Weve got a week to go before the best cross-country mountain bike riders in the world all meet at Elancourt Continue reading