MBUK 281 is in the shops today! But what’s inside it we hear you cry? Well, this lot for starters!

We go gravity enduro racing with Jérôme Clementz, and Jake Ireland tackles enduro, downhill and 4X all on the same bike at the iXS Dirt Masters. Doddy and the Wrecking Crew gang also get some 4X action in at the Leamington Spa 4X course and pump tracks.

In the south of the country, Jack Gear shows us how his portable ramp set-up can transform coastal street riding in Bude, Cornwall, and in the North, Andy MacCandlish takes the Santa Cruz and ENVE boys into the wild in back country Scotland.

Words of Wisdom from Fabien Barel

Ric goes Yeti hunting in Shropshire, to discover why this turquoise wonder brand captures the imagination like no other. Also in Shropshire, we go on a Big Ride to discover the amazing trails of Long Mynd.

There’s also tons of new gear tested, as well as a look at Specialized’s brand new 2013 bike ranges.

It’s double World Champion fest as multiple DH World Champ Fabien Barel shares his words of wisdom, and former 4X World Champ Brian Lopes gives us a close-up look of his Ibis Tranny Super Bike.

Want to learn new skills? You’ve got it – Joe Rafferty shows you all the essential techniques you need to ride alpine-style terrain. Plus we’ve got a complete guide to drivetrain set-up and maintenance.

Plus you get a free ‘dirt box’ wallet and pull-out route maps!

Don’t miss out – get your issue today. Or why not subscribe and never miss an issue?

Jack Gear gets some air in Cornwall

Jérôme Clementz shows us how gravity enduro is done!

The Cycle Show is going to be better than ever this year! It’s held at the NEC in Birmingham on 28 to 30 September and is your chance to see brand new gear from the top mountain biking brands.

Specialized, Trek and Madison will be bringing a selection of their test bikes along so there’ll be an amazing choice of 2013 bikes to ride – you can try them out on the Dare2b Mountain Bike demo track.

Inside the NEC halls, you’ll find a new MTB pump track and a VIP lounge where you can meet pro riders, medallists and celebs.

DMR will be hosting a round of their Pump Track Challenge there too, so you can watch pro riders battle it out!

You lucky MBUK readers can get into the show for cheap too! Simply head over to www.cycleshow.co.uk/book and enter the discount code ‘MBUK’ to get a ticket for £11.50, saving you a tidy £4.50 off the on-the-door price.

Try out the latest bikes on the Dare 2b Mountain Bike demo course

 I don’t know what it is with my longers, there’s something about my hirsute coupon which just seems to scream ‘keep him waiting, keep him waiting’. Finally though, the wait is over. Sort of.

My new Specialized Stumpjumper FSR Comp Evo has arrived. Again, sort of…

Now, normally a week after receiving a new bike, it’s finally beginning to feel ‘there’. I’ve found my base settings, got the right windage in the tyres and (normally) fitted some new bars. Sadly though, this hasn’t been the case with my new Stumpy.

You see, Guy Kesteven has been on the phone, or rather, the email. The Evo is needed up north for a bike test and will then be returned to me. This has me worried. I’ve frequently ‘unpacked’ bikes which Guy has finished with in the past and it usually involves tipping the various brutalised remains out on to the workshop floor and then piecing them together like something out of Silent Witness…

Anyway, best not to dwell…

So why the Stumpy? Well, as much as I loved my Whyte 19 Trail Steel last year, I just couldn’t look past the glorious Pivot Mach 5.7 nestling beside it. The combination of light weight, slack angles and superb handling just sold me even more on the virtues of the modern full-sus trail bike. The fact that it was tough enough to race the Mega on was the icing on the cake. My next bike would have a lot to live up to…

And so with Captain Weaver’s words of keeping costs down ringing in my ears, I headed on to that most tempting of sweet-shops – the internet.

If I’m honest though, I already had an idea as to what I was after. I rode the first incarnation of the Specialized Stumpy Evo back in the dust and heat cauldron of Bootleg Canyon two years ago and instantly got on with it. We get to ride a lot of bikes here at MBUK and objectivity is paramount to work out what’s working and who it’ll work for. When you then throw a leg over something that suits you personally, it’s a great feeling.

I liked the idea behind Specialized’s Evo series – more travel, slacker angles, agro spec. Go fast, have fun. Simple.

More-over, I’ve always liked Specialized themselves too. There is an element which will always give them grief for the shiny corporate image but the fact is that they’ve done a lot for mountain biking. Indeed, the Stumpjumper was the first massed-produced mountain bike, the Horst-link FSR suspension design did for full-sus what the Audi Quattro did for rallying and racing has always been an important part of what the big red ‘S’ is all about.

Anyway… I digress. When it all boils down to a perfectly clear chicken consomme of facts, the Evo offers 150mm (6in) of travel, aggressive angles, the new Specialized Command Post and some tough Roval wheels. There’s also a 2×10 complete with guide and guard drivetrain and a Fox RP23 rear shock featuring their new Auto-Sag. Add all this together and stick a chunky set of DH tyres and you won’t go much quicker for £2500.

Will it be as good as it sounds?! Will Guy send it back as a tubeset?! Stay tuned to this blog and MBUK to find out soon…

We know there’s a lot of controversy surrounding 29in wheels at the moment, but really, you can’t knock something until you’ve tried it!

Around the same time as we put that together, our sister website, BikeRadar.com were running a video series on 29er mountain bikes, designed to dispel some of the myths that have been, for want of a better word, pedalled over the years about the bigger wheeled bikes.

The five-part series, presented by Mountain Biking UK and What Mountain Bike gurus Doddy and Justin Loretz, aims to highlight some of the benefits to 29ers over 26in bikes, such as better traction, improved stability and superior handling of rough terrain.

You can see all the videos, in the order they were made, below.

And don’t forget to head over to our forum and tell us what you think!

First up, the current World Champion bares his Hart & Soul (part one)…

Specialized riders Sam Hill and Troy Brosnan’s pre-season training in Perth…

And ealier this week, GT Factory Racing unveiled their new look. It’s certainly a lot stealthier than the Athertons’ previous blue-and-white look with Commencal…

This year’s UCI World Cup series kicks off in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa this weekend. Red Bull will be streaming all rounds live.

 Back in issue 269, I wrote a piece in Out Front called ‘Pushing the boundaries’ which basically tried to highlight the increased use of carbon fibre when it comes to constructing the worlds fastest DH bikes.

The black shiny stuff is back on the agenda as far as DH frame builders are concerned. Better production methods (well, they do use the odd bit of it in something called ‘F1‘) and an industry push to produce more entry-level/price-tagged machinery has resulted in the top of the line kit becoming even faster and dare I say it, flashier.

If you take a look at the top twenty ranked men in the world according to the official UCI rankings,  as many as 11 of the top 20 riders will be on carbon fibre-framed machinery come the Pietermaritzburg start-gate in six weeks time.

Now, bear with me here, this is making a couple of assumptions… Firstly, that the rumours of Monster Energy Specialized (Troy Brosnan in this case) are testing a carbon fibre framed Demo. Secondly, that you count the extremely hard-worked backends of the Lapierre DH 920‘s of Cameron Cole and Sam Blenkinsop.

However, forgive me those assumptions and consider that Sam Hill isn’t within those rankings (currently 36th) but could be on the same machinery (IF it exists) as Troy and also that there are extensive rumours that ex-team-mate Brendan Fairclough will also soon be running a prototype black and shiny all-new Scott DH bike.

Look outside the top twenty teams and Intense (still a staunch privateers favourite) have long pondered a carbon fibre framed DH bike too but, as with everything else, are striving to produce it as in-house as possible. That said, the arrival of their Carbine SL could be the precursor to something along those very lines.

Also rumoured to be popping wonderment out of steaming hot moulds are Yeti Cycles with their team allegedly set to be lining up on full carbon fibre machinery at Pietermaritzberg. That would fit in well with the fact that the alloy version of their new 303 DH looks set to arrive in February, every Yeti of course gets two years of race R+D before launch.

With weight limits dropping all the time, will we one day see a road race style UCI weight limit that bikes can not dip under? The questions are (reasonably) endless.

But what does all this hypothesis and supposition mean in the more immediate future? A move away from the time-hounoured world of bits of metal welded together with glorified strings and glue leading the way? For the top-whack machines it would appear so but hopefully companies like GT can shine a bit more light on the future for the rest of us. They produce their Fury in a more wallet-friendly alloy version with the top-whack machine coming in full World Cup spec carbon fibre (they’ve yet to confirm that this one will be available in the UK though). Whatever the answer, the future looks fast!

The Bike Show at Excel in London is a great place to see what’s going on and catch up with some key contacts for us. There’s a lot of buzz right now…

Whyte's 29er carbon race rocket. Will we see an XL? *coughs*

Whyte bikes, the small company designed right here in Blighty by Ian Alexander and the great team at Whyte keep on pushing things forwards. With the 10 year progression of 29er bikes finally starting to flower, they are right on the money with their slightly slacker, faster and damn right light carbon race hard tails. A stunning bit of craft.

I reckon many people could ride these as fast off road as a good rider on a 150mm travel bike. Can’t wait to get on one, although currently only in limited sizes. Any chance of an XL please guys?

There are enough people that would want one, surely..?

Evoc- first prize in the unofficial cool stand competition!

Evoc had the coolest stand at the show- set out like an arrivals lounge at the airport, complete with display and flight numbers. Loads of effort gone in, and damn nice bags to boot. New for 2012 is their light weight body armour range- but more on that soon.

Rose bikes team DH- a nice bit of kit.

German giant Rose bikes seem to be a brand on the move too, refining their already nice DH frame in to a light weight racer with a dialled 64degree head angle. This is the team edition, which will be raced by the new Rose Vaujany team, made up of whiptastic DH racer Nico Vink, 4X and general style monger Joost ‘The Boost’ Wichman and the UK’s own Katy Curd.

Rose Jester Slopestyle. £1279, that is all...

There’s also a rad new Slopestyle bike, with 120mm travel, and a complete build price as seen here at £1279!

Could be just the ticket for mini DH; dirt jumps; 4X or any amount of looning around you might like!

Hard Eddie. Bad to the bone.

Intense Hard Eddie 29er.

I don’t need to say much here that two simple words don’t say on their own:

Bad Ass.

Stunning fork up front. I feel hot and bothered looking at this- I want!

And check out the fork- a fine stealthy contender to the Niner Air Carbon fork. But instead of the XC pedigree, you have the Intense stamp of mayhem- this is the whippet bike that hard core riders don’t realise they need…

Man and machine.

Martyn Ashton made a great video in which he flipped a road bike, did a little bit of trials and a bunch of other unthinkable stuff. So he’s gone to town and has built up a custom Cannondale Cyclocross bike, complete with a Hope trials rear hub with ultra fast pick up, and a few other extras. You may have seen him back flip it in one of the shows, but really you need to see him manual the thing round- it’s a piss take!
Got to take my hat off and give the man a little bow though- he’s one of the hardest working men in mountain biking and works flat out to promote mountain biking to audiences that might not be aware of it.

Martyn Ashton- still tearing it up after all the years. He deserves an award.

Mart is nearly 40, and he is still king of the castle.

You rock mate, keep doing it.

Rutger Hauer just out of shot.

The Excel centre at night, for some reason reminded me of the film Bladerunner. Or maybe the sight of a Ferrari Enzo and a Sunseeker boat worth 15million had made me go light headed.

This boat is bigger than my flat.

I wonder how much the contents of this hall was worth?

The boat show is something else, and one of the only places you can go- as a vaguely affluent person- and feel like a complete and utter tramp.

Paddle boarding out of shot. They were too fast.

Paddle boarding is hard core- you should have seen the size of the dudes racing in the pool. They all looked like Dolph Lundgren.

Mr Crud-  Pete Tomkins-  and his son Jamie are really in to paddle boarding as part of their active lifestyle. And you should see the condition Pete is in- he’s a gnarly old dude now and reminds me of a happy version of Taylor from that Sci-fi show Terra Nova…

There was a large following for the Bike Polo at the show. These guys look familiar- kind of like most the inhabitents of Hoxton but with kneepads and hockey helmets.

Got to say, I saw some pretty hard-core crashes and slamming action going on. It looks tricky and actually really good fun. But still makes me think of this… (Rob S over at Continental Tyres, this is for you…)

Finally, here’s a few random shots of recent stuff going on here at MBUK towers.

Doddy's Ibis HD 160, before being attacked with Muc-Off

And after...

Specialized Camber Comp Carbon 29er. So fast it's a joke.

The MBUK photo studio, yesterday.

A bike, yesterday.

Over and out…

We’re lucky enough to have a set of Brendan Fairclough’s own Speed Equipment Pro 2012 team kit, complete in Monster Energy Specialized livery, to give away.

The prize comprises a Troy Lee Designs SE Pro jersey with custom sponsors details and a pair of Troy Lee Designs SE Pro trousers.

It’s been kindly donated by Troy Lee’s UK distributor Fishers Outdoor and could be yours if you hop on over to www.futurecomps.co.uk/271bren and answer the simple question on the page.

Good luck!