There's more behind the bucket of wins from the likes of Greg Minnaar, Aaron Gwin, and Rachel Atherton than you might think. All of these racers (and any other Fox athlete) have a team of technicians at their disposal to help take their setup from woeful to winning in a matter of clicks at any World Cup or E.W.S. throughout the season. We swung by during Lenzerheide qualifying morning to see what was cooking on the grill and what was being worked on in the vices.
First and foremost could you explain your role throughout the weekend?
We do service and tuning primarily for our sponsored athletes but we are here and will help anyone we can. Obviously, we’re not here to do scheduled maintenance and save you money, we’re here to keep people racing and at a high level. We will help anybody we can if the time allows.
We do all of the E.W.S. and sometimes we’ll hop into a Crankworx if it’s easy enough, we’re a small crew of around 2–3 per weekend, so we can’t really manage all of them. World Cup is our priority.
Have you got any rough figures for the number of services you’ll typically do in a weekend?
We do around 60 forks and 30 shocks a weekend, track walk day is flat out all day. The rest of the week is largely tuning, putting out little fires, small f*** ups, whether it’s ours or theirs…
Do you ever get team mechanics playing around with the suspension instead of coming to you?
Oh yeah, that happens. Little by little it’ll go down hill till they turn up here, have a little tizzy and we sort it out again!
Are there any particular riders than you demand more or less attention than others? For example, we see you in the Syndicate videos with Greg Minnaar pretty often.
Yeah, he’s pretty high on the list of people wanting to change things all the time. Aaron Gwin is probably second but he’s very narrowly focused, it’s a couple things here and there, and then done. Greg will go 180 degrees weekend to weekend and they’ll always be good, he can ride it. I’m not sure how it works! Those two riders we both spend a lot of time with outside of racing as they’re both pretty close to Fox, so we know each other pretty well, those are the two I spend the most time with outside of racing.
How easy is it to make changes off the back of rider feedback?
It's usually alright. I mean obviously, again you build up the relationship and understand, and use your base of knowledge to understand what’s going on. History and immediate feedback help to work things out.
Have you guys got base settings from tracks last year that you can work from?
We do track all the information but it changes year to year. Rider to rider, bikes change, setups change. Bikes are so finicky for setup, they’re not the same as other vehicles because rider input is a massive amount of it. You shift your body weight 10cm forward or whatever and it changes everything, in a moto or car that really doesn’t change as much.
Obviously you have the big truck here in Europe but how does it work when you fly to the likes of Mont Sainte Anne?
It's funny because we are an American company and Mont Sainte Anne is the hardest race other than Australia as we have very little support there. All of our product comes to Europe as that’s 90% of our racing—for me I generally have to fly with it and wing it. We try to get everyone sorted before those races, emailing teams to bring their spares as they all have them. We are limited on what we can do, like shipping stuff to Australia is really expensive customs wise. If it even shows up. We try to bring everything we can every time!
| This is the second weekend we’ve had this truck so we have had no time to properly sort anything out. We’ve kind of just pulled all the parts from the old setup and thrown them in. This will be the primary interior workstation, [though we're] still sorting it all out. The toolbox shouldn’t be there, there will be another vice—by Italy, it’ll all be sorted. There’s two technician stations, a vacuum cleaner, three Bose systems because we can’t figure out the new Sonos system…—Jordi Cortes |
The new setup is massive, it's a more usable space. It's deeper and square, you don’t have the weird corner we used to have behind the van. We have plenty of storage for easy access to all the spares, we carry both individual spares and complete forks and shocks as there are more and more people riding our products.
| The big difference with this setup is that we have a truck with four seats, so we can drive away and the tent stays up. The old setup we had to use the truck as part of the setup and that was a pain as we always had to have a rental car.—Jordi Cortes |
MENTIONS: @rossbellphoto / @foxracingshox
The shipping and import duty costs for wheel sponsors is even worse than for suspension.