Broken On Live TV: The Untold Story of Pivot’s New Phoenix DH Bike

What we were really trying to do is just develop a much faster bike and whatever it took to get there was what we wanted to do. So that's cost him a little bit more time, probably finds himself 6.6. Oh the big one for Kerr! Wow. Interrogation. I remember exactly where I was. I was sleeping and I had forgotten to turn off my do not disturb and it was somewhere between 1 30 a.m. and 3 in the morning and my phone dings and it's Bernard telling me that he crashed that the bike broke on live feed and then a bunch of photos of like dirt filling the head tube and the top tube where the top tube and the down tube were just buried into the ground. He was absolutely our he was our best tester when he was a young kid racing for us. We could have bikes all over the place people riding them everywhere and we'd send something to him and he'd find the best way to break it sometimes you know and so it was great because we knew if we just sent it to him we we'd get there and we do a lot of other testing of but sometimes real world riding is just not that predictable and so he had a talent for that in his earlier days but his riding has changed immensely over the years and not that one way was better than the other but I think he rides a bit smoother than he used to and a little cleaner. Yeah I've known Bernard 14-15 years maybe a little bit longer we had a new UK distributor and he said we have this up-and-coming kid that we'd like to sponsor could you give us a frame and it was it was Bernard Kerr and and then the next call was Bernard wants to do some world cups can he pit out of your team sure why not and then the next calls were from the team manager that this guy's breaking all of our parts and he's he's just tough on stuff and he's taking all my time and I need to really focus on the other riders yeah we had gone the better part of a world cup season and top world cup guys we hadn't had a single frame failure Bernard had his first frame three days and broke it and I think the next one went two weeks he became a really invaluable tester from that point on that he's just rough on shit there's only so much testing you can do you gotta design the bike for 99.9% of the people but there's always that 0.1% that person that can just break anything he might just be that guy oh he's done it he's done it sports fans I'm impressed that was solid he's getting 10 bucks I saw the first drawing probably at February in Chile I saw it and it was Kevin and Dave Weagle and Chris and everyone coming up with it and it was just trying to make a new bike we'd had the other one for a while it was an amazing bike I did really good on it at the world cups but they just wanted to come up with something new and obviously this mullet thing like the smaller back wheel has become like a big thing and downhill and everyone's pushing for it and just innovation Chris at Pivot even though he's like a company owner he's like an engineer at heart and he always wants to innovate and make his bikes better and he's always looking ahead asking me like what could we do better here is this good is this good I've been really involved with like I think the aesthetics is what I like I want the bike to look good they asked me about that and what did I think of the two chains like that was really like out the gate the first thing we saw in the drawing when it was like a CAD drawing and I was hyped and I was kind of nervous at the start but then I was like this is so cool something so different riding it around the car park for the first time was unreal it was kind of like nervous I was in Phoenix at the headquarters and there was like 10 of them like Kevin everyone like the chief engineers everyone from R&D watching me pedal the bike around the car park so you're like real nervous just pedaling it it was unbelievably exciting and then terrifying because we're up on the rockiest trails you've ever seen in Arizona and I haven't ridden them for a while I would say you can just mow stuff down like it gives you like a real strong confidence slightly longer obviously the reach and things but the biggest is honestly the suspension platform I feel like like oh I need to break here why do you need a break here I'm gonna straight line obviously turns are hard you need bike skill but often we do ride stuff at world cup tracks where it is just letting off the brakes you know earlier than someone else or not breaking as much into a section this bit's so gnarly I always enjoy Bernard's visits because he gets so excited about all the things that we're doing he's like a little kid in a candy store and he's got his hand in oh this is so cool what are you doing here and and so it brings an excitement for our team too because he's so passionate about what he does I have been with Pivot from the very beginning I built the very first Mach 4 and Mach 5 I used to have a machine shop and I built those in my machine shop my name is Bill Kibler I'm the manager of R&D and also the QC manager whatever Chris and Kevin dream up I try to make their reality we originally made all of our prototypes in aluminum and so you could make changes and stuff but you can't really we got close to right feel and quality but you can't really get there so doing the lugged version we did do some full layup but to make the molds and all the pieces that go along with it and then if you like didn't like something you got to start all over from scratch so doing the lugged version we can minimize the extra work that you have to do and the molds and the support pieces that you have to have and so we can do it relatively quick we had a very short timeline here to pull off a lot of we actually designed two different frames to test in the beginning and so we just stayed focused and put it all together and and basically made it just in time I do remember exactly where I was yeah it was uh it was that Sunday I think I had like gone to the park with some friends and we were just hanging out and then I got back home and I got the email from Chris about the whole rundown every like all the feeling just like left my body is just numb I had to reread it and it is like the most like dejected probably I've ever felt in terms of like something that I personally worked on because Bernard and everybody has trust in us you know we have a relationship that we make the bike in all ways as great as possible and so my first thought obviously was is he okay because like if that was somebody else being injured because of that you know you as somebody who had a hand in in making it and having them like I said they trust you to to do that you definitely always have that feeling of like man what what did we do wrong and what could have changed and difficult to go to sleep that night it was difficult to wake up and come into work the next day and I walked in and just looked at Bill and we're just like damn the reason it failed this it's actually almost comical we we had a a bunch of press here for the switchblade launch and they were all very excited to see Bernard's bike being bonded and so we took longer to bond it an extended amount of time and slowed down all the processes and maybe a few more hands touched lugs after they had been etched than should have you know it should have gone right to the process and bam bam bam time is everything on this stuff and and even slowing down letting the glue sit out having that etchant sit out minutes longer than the process made a huge difference because the bikes that were made the day before the bikes that were made the day after we couldn't find another frame in that batch that that had a problem and even more crushing at the time was the fact that we were getting all the the pivot next gen kids on their bikes we've got parents from the junior kids calling us should we be worried about the bike our kids riding and well yeah hell yeah you should be worried um we need to get that back here and we really had to figure out what happened why it happened and ensure that it could never happen again and then also build everybody brand new bikes so it's a big project we put ourselves out there because we knew that the bike was going to be so good and it is so good part of that is you have everybody's eyes on you and when everybody's eyes are on you and you're front and center you really are under a lot of pressure to perform well until the moment that something goes astray people seem to forget that it really is just our attempt at just making the the best possible in the shortest amount of time main upside of r&d is that it's usually one-offs when you're really trying to get every ounce of productivity out of like a mass-produced frame you want to find where you can really make everything uniform but for us even if it takes us a little bit more time for something that we really need to hammer in we can we can just tighten our tolerances to the utmost degree and hold something if we really need to have that meet our our specifications and i think that that is uh an upside for sure because if we really needed to just bang bang bang out frames it'd be a lot harder to do that and of course at scale for production and factories that's no problem for them uh so i handle all like the the carbon related activities as far as uh making the prototype bikes so i do the carbon layup and then prep the tubes for bonding and then help bond there's a lot you can do as far as carbon layup uh for the ride tuning so you can change like how thick the tubes are you can bulk up certain areas some areas are actually like solid pretty much they just tell me like when i'm making the tubes they tell me like we need a tube to be this thick we're completely in control of like the quality but it's it's more so for rapid prototyping because we can we can get a bike from a design get the molds done get the carbon tubes done bond it together in like a couple weeks so it's it's significantly faster than trying to get a factory to build a bike for us and if we need to make a change it's easier for us to make changes in-house like that we're a company built on built by nerds i think really when it comes down to it so we really enjoy trying new stuff out and uh so sure this is i mean maybe it's more like a leaf but it's also a stepping stone to us doing better stuff moving forward we knew we wanted to do like a mid-high pivot we wanted to at least try a mid-high pivot bike and for us that was the way that made the most sense this six bar system with the two chains is a good way to go about it a lot of those high pivot bikes are stretching out a ton when they're in corners and stuff and that really was something we didn't want to have that like varying geometry while you're trying to make a corner so going somewhere in the middle having that compromise gets you a bike that will still corner consistently you know my desire to make the best bike we can make and to have fun on them i was looking forward to making two how could you not enjoy that it was pretty fun i would say earlier on burner didn't like change because when we came out with the 27.5 wheels he didn't want 27.5 and then when he was on our prototype aluminum 27.5 bike he had his best finish ever in any pro downhill race and he's like okay i like 27.5 wheels and then the 29 inch thing is where we felt we needed to go there's only so far we could go up with dw link without affecting things we knew just wouldn't work on pedal kickback we were talking to dave weagle about wanting to compensate for that and we we do want to work on testing a mid-high pivot design and seeing how much more speed and bump absorption we could get out of the system can we get the travel back that we lost when we went to 29 inch wheels and then some what can we do to make this the ultimate world cup bike certainly on geometry and certain things he was asking for and but bernard's really the driver on what everybody on the team the direction they want to go and and they really follow his bike setup and what he wants in a bike so the feedback on that and all the testing we had a lot more time to refine and learn and dial things in with the team and so yeah him his mechanic the whole team has has really had the opportunity to develop this bike into what the production bike will be this new bike is certainly has some new structural elements and stuff in it that are a little different than any other bike we've ever done my goal is always you know i look at the designs that chris and kevin are going towards and then i just focus on getting them done making sure that it's all right and that we don't make any mistakes because they're all exciting to make and so they all they both had different characteristics and to be able to put them all together and and then see the final product and then let the team be the judge on it that was kind of like the icing on the cake the future of pivot factory racing honestly hopefully just more of the same more races more wins we want to build out we've got to win a world cup and a dream of mine would be to win a world cup as a team because they do like the overall team of the day and i would love nothing more to win that as like the pivot team like because i've started this from so long ago now that would probably be the coolest thing we could ever do like i would love to win a race but i think i'd rather win as a team of the day we've done it in enduro a number of times and that has been unreal we won the overall as a team in enduro but if we could win a downhill world cup team of the day that would be awesome so more racing hopefully the sport just continues to grow and the hard lines get bigger and better and the world cups continue to grow we go to some cool new venues would be rad passion and evolution i mean it's we we're not generally a company to throw the baby out with the bath water we we start on a process and we refine and we refine and we refine and so the evolution of where this has come to and then the passion of why we're doing it there's so many little pieces and so many things going on on this bike that at this point have nothing to do with the rest of our line or the success of our company but everybody in that r and d shop everybody in design i mean everybody in the company is so into it and our customers are into it too so it's really the passion of doing this and and seeing what we're capable of and seeing what the products we build are capable of