It's been a long time since I rode my bike. Winter’s long in Whistler and although snowboarding down steep, deep tree runs is fun there has been a distinct lack of powder days this year so I’m getting tired of the cold, hard, white stuff.
So the time had come to burst out of the bubble and escape to some friends in the Cove for the hottest product holeshot of the year.
The new Evil Revolt downhill bike is something I and many others have been waiting to see in the flesh since a tantalising line drawing laptop dance at Interbike in September, so we cracked open the crates on the final prototypes and started building.
We were still tweaking Fox forks at Mr Fox’s [Gabe, Evil's co-owner] when the last member of our party landed at 2am after 33 hours of airtime across the Atlantic, but there’s no way we weren’t going to be ready for the next day!
We bolted down Mexican breakfast and backed off some compression before some team-only stealth training laps on the local mountain.
I couldn’t resist sneaking the global media debut on this wicked rig on the stairs-to-parking lot transition before we wandered downtown for business.
Sitting delightfully into its 203mm of controlled compression, it’s obvious this is going to be a totally sick sled that’ll reset a lot of benchmarks this year.
Formula One racing adjustability that Lewis Hamilton would be jealous of results in a system that, as Canadian racer Steve Smith puts it, "accelerates over square edge hits".
It's team time only for final tweaks though, so I had to leave 3 big smiles behind and return to the bubble with thoughts of all the loamy corners and sweet dual suspension curves to come this summer.