Flat Out In Andorra With Nina Hoffmann, Bodhi Kuhn, And Jordi Cortés – The Setup | FOX

You're going by so fast, and it's all bright white, and there's just loose rock everywhere, and you're like, I remember what it's supposed to look like. You're just guessing on these lines because you cannot see anything whatsoever. Some of the ruts were just like straight out of bounds, and I'm like, you guys can't be riding over there. The dust has barely settled on the Twill downhill track, but we're already back at it. Pack the trucks, cross Europe, and do it all over again. For the athletes, their teams, and of course Fox Factory, there's no hitting the stop switch at this point in the season. You've got to take what you learned last weekend and get back to work. And there was plenty to take from Le Twill. Ace Vermette, who kicked off the season with that rookie win in South Korea, was back on the podium for the third time in second place. Then there's Jackson Goldstone. After a slow start in 2026, he's starting to look like himself again. Third place on Le Twill, and a strong signal that the Jackson who closed out 2025 on a tear might just be back. That's a big horse. But it wasn't just the top of the field who was making noise last round. Bodhi Kuhn, who's been building momentum throughout the last few races, picked up a career-best top ten. And Nina Hoffman backed up a solid Q1 performance with a season-best fifth place. In order to progress, limits must be pushed. And prior success? Well, that doesn't guarantee anything. And now we're in Palau Arancel, Andorra. A small country in the Pyrenees that packs well above its weight in mountain sport. It's not the steepest track, but it's dangerously high speed. And with that speed, I expect to see some of the tightest times of the season. And with the hot weather and dusty conditions, this track is going to deteriorate heavily from practice to finals. I'm Remy Gauvin. Welcome to Andorra. And welcome to The Setup. Okay, Bodhi. So, as a rider, you always want to improve on the results that you've had in the past. But in order to do that, that's, you know, really hard. And the last few races, you've actually been able to do that. How does that make you feel? It's good. I mean, it's the consistency that, like, that's what I strive for in my riding, probably more than anything. That's something that has helped me get to where I am today. It's always been a strong suit of mine. And like you said, it's incredibly difficult to continue to take a step week after week. And, you know, every week when you get closer to the top, there's not that much more room to keep going up. So, you know, as I get into the top ten of that, I would love to be able to, you know, do better every week. But it is one of those things where you just have to focus on the riding and the marginal gains and the really small things. And then, you know, if you're doing all that right and you trust in the process, you will end up doing better. What do you think of this track? How do you like Andorra? I really like riding it. I don't really love racing it very much. It's really short. It's super, super tight racing. And it's all similar to Lenzerheide about minimizing mistakes. But the track is inherently looser, so it's harder to not make those mistakes. So it ends up being a little bit technical, like from the headspace-wise. But when you get into a good flow, it is really fun and it's enjoyable. And I've done well, so... It's really fast, this track. Really good. And so the margin for error, like, becomes smaller and smaller the faster the track is. How do you like that sort of track versus, like, La Thuile, which is a very steep track? I prefer the steep. Yeah. I don't mind fast. I find this track, the fastest bits are also the tightest bits. So you're, like, dodging trees and you're on a really narrow line that degrades really fast and it's hard to see. So that makes it super challenging. I don't mind, like, the speed of it just to ride. But it is hard to ride at that speed and also be as precise as you need to be. Do you think the bike setup is going to change a lot from La Thuile, super steep track, to here? No? No, not really. We've been running pretty much the same setup for the last couple of weeks now, the last couple of races. Maybe a little bit of stack height changes and maybe a few small suspension tweaks, but really nothing major. You switched from coil to air last weekend? Just testing right after Lanzarote. And that was a good change. That was a really good change, yeah. It really woke the bike up. And it really, the grip in the corners and the stability that it provides is quite noticeable. And it's a very different feel from any other downhill bike I've ridden in air shock arms. Sick. Okay, well, it looks like you guys are trying to get to track walk here, so I'll let you go. No stress, thank you very much. Have a good one. Okay, Naina, we just finished track walk here in Andorra. What do you think of this track? Flat out. Super dry. Corners on top look perfect at the moment. They won't be as good. They won't be perfect. You got some, like, bike park to start out, ease into the ride. It's kind of bike park-y at the start, but it's full on straight away. So if you chill in those corners, you definitely can't use the race. You have to be pinned straight away. You mentioned to me on track that this track is pretty high consequence. Fast, it's fun, but if you mess it up, it can be pretty bad. Yeah, that's the thing with tracks like that. And especially when it's that dry, your speeds are higher. And when something goes wrong, it goes really wrong. And in the mid section, we have quite a couple sections where you go through tight trees. And there's a lot of mats on those trees. But still, if you're going to mess up a section, it's going to hurt. Last week in Lituile, best result of the season. Are you happy with fifth place? I mean, you've won quite a few times. So fifth place isn't maybe what you're striving for, but best result of the season. Yeah, you sum it up pretty well, actually. It is my best result of the season. I found my groove back. I found speed. I found the feeling of I want to push. I want to go fast. And that's what I take away from it. And it's funny that I was actually a bit disappointed in the finish because it is my best result. But I wanted a bit more. And I knew I could have done a little better here and there. It was a really good run, but just not a perfect run. There would have been a bit room for improvement, especially towards the bottom. I got this feeling of, oh, this is a good run. I want to bring it down now. So I took a bit of intensity off in the last sector. Yeah, you're like, let's not throw it away here. Exactly. But hey, it's all good. I've got a mindset back. That's important. Is it just building on kind of a slow start to the season? Getting that feeling back? Is it bike setup? What's going right? I think it's a mix of things. So before my season, I had a thumb injury. Couldn't ride for four or five weeks just before the season. Then got into South Korea. Crashed pretty hard there and kind of thought, oh, it's all good. We're just going to get back on the bike. Easy peasy. But then I had another two, two and a half weeks off and only rode one day before Lüneburg. And I think it was just too much no bike time. Just needed a few races to build that. So it's just building. Yeah. As soon as you lose that momentum from an injury or something, it takes such a long time. Especially when everyone's riding so much. It's insane. You can't chill anymore. Can't chill. And bike setup, you think that'll change from Lutwil to here? Like it's way less steep. It's a lot flatter. Way faster. Yeah. So we've done a couple of changes in Lutwil that I think gave me quite a bit of confidence in this steep stuff. And we changed the geometry a little bit. We changed the fork. I'm on the new airspring finally, which I couldn't test before the season because it was injured. And I got on it before Lenzerheide. And Lenzerheide was the first race where I felt like getting a bit of confidence back. Back going into Andorra now, we have to change a bit. I think we're running from the steepest to the flattest track. We have raced here a couple of times. We have set up sheets from the last years. I know how the bike runs on flatter tracks. So we're going to do a few changes in advance. Like I'm not going to start on the same setup as Lutwil. That's for sure. And then we work our way to a really good and fast race setup. Okay, well we'll check out tomorrow and see how it's going. Thanks Nina. Thank you. Appreciate it. He looks so awkward like that. He does? So we're talking to Bodhi this week as well as Nina. And from what I've spoken to them so far, Bodhi has said he's going to change almost nothing from Lutwil last weekend to here. And Nina on the other hand is going to kind of change your bike up to suit this less steep track. I know that you are kind of, you don't like to over tune. You like to keep it simple. Make sure that you're not doing sweeping changes from round to round. But these tracks are so different. What do you think is the right move here? Ooh, that's a good question. This track offers very little feedback. There's nothing solid other than the rocks. So everything in between is no feel. The ground's moving. The ground's chunking. You're in powder. I don't think a stiff setup is the worst thing in the world just because the bike stays consistent. I think bars can be a little bit lower because speeds are so much higher. Like average speed is pretty high. In my opinion lets you run a lower cockpit. More janky stuff you generally want to sit up a bit higher. There's not a lot of steep turns either. I don't think there's a single steep turn. No, no. So I think really it's just about comfort at speed and keeping a nice centered position on the bike. So what you're saying, so what you're saying Jordi is neither one of them is wrong. Yeah, I guess that's what I am saying. Nina mentioned that you weren't going to start with the same setup from La Tuile to here. Track's a lot flatter than La Tuile. What did you change before you even started first lap? So before we started first lap we actually changed the geometry of the bike a little bit. So we put the shock from the low position into the mid. Which is affecting the geometry a little bit. A tiny bit of kinematics on the shock. The main change we really did to suspension is we opened up the compression a bit. We tend to trend that way a lot in practice. Just to make the bike a bit more comfy and you know rather than start on a race bike that's unrideable. In previous years here we found whether it's the heat, the altitude, the bike's too pingy basically. With similar setups we'd run elsewhere. Yeah I think some people like to ride into a race setup. And other people like to progress their setup into a race setup. And it's just two different philosophies right? Yeah. It kind of depends on the track and how confident Nina is on the day. Feeling like let's go and attack straight away. We'll ride into a race setup. If not it's like progress the bike with the speed if you like. Right. Bodhi was saying that he probably wasn't going to change that much setup wise from La Tuile to here. Even though the tracks are almost polar opposite like this one's pretty low angle. Yep. La Tuile is super steep. At the moment Bodhi's on a setup that he's really comfortable with. He's really happy with kind of where the bike is. To start off with we weren't making any sort of preemptive changes. We'd sort of talked about maybe going down a little bit in bar height. One big change that you made a couple weeks ago is pretty much the whole team went from coil shock to air shock right? This year we've got a slightly different frame. We've got a few different bearings and things like that that reduce some of the drag that was in the linkage originally. Obviously with an air shock it's a little bit harsher off the top than the coil. With these new bearings we have the ability to be able to run the air shock at kind of a similar setup to what the coil was. We were trying to see if the air shock would generate a bit more speed than the coil shock. Obviously as it ramps up that kind of gives you a bit more of a base push off. But also it can match the forks progression as well obviously because they're both air. So we were kind of trying to see if that would even the bikes stroke out over the geometry of the bike as it goes through the shavel. That's something that we've been working with recently and he's really enjoying it. The whole team has swapped over now. Boaty I see you a little dusty, a little ice on your hands, maybe a little bit more on your feet. Tell me about what's going on here. Well you know I was just on my last lap of the day. A nice sighter, just really enjoying it, looking at the lines. And I just came down to the bottom, crashed on the turn that Gracie crashed on in a race run last year. Stupid turn. Was it a sight lap or was it like a fast top split? I did that really poorly so I wanted to do a quick one there. And I was like absolutely cruising, like felt real good and smooth. So I was like coming in, push, felt mint. The next thing I know I'm doing a 360. I don't know what's going on, I just roll my ankle a little bit. Seems like you're not too worried about it. No, I mean come on. I've gone through a lot worse than this. Last time I rolled my ankle here, just snapped clean through basically. So a little sprain is happening. This track is pretty gnarly. It's super loose but you have to be super precise. Which is like, that's a pretty hard combination. Yeah, they're asking a lot of us actually. How was it out there today? You were looking pinned. It's one of those ones where you can feel good pretty easily. And then if you're looking for little bits of time in any sector and you go to push. The limit you need to find in between pushing and being super consistent feels like it's razor thin. You're going to have to either be making some mistakes and be okay with that. Or you're going to have to take a little bit of an edge off and just ride super smooth. Realistically you can't be on that edge the entire run. And I think you've seen that in the past even on race winning runs. Do you think you know where you have to push and where you have to take it easy? Have you kind of decided that yet? I mean I thought so, but now I'm ******* crashing in the last turn for no reason. And how was the bike today? The start of the day on DHR Ascai went pretty quickly to more of an intermediate tire. Just trying to cut through because we were surfing up there. I did say that to you when we were in line. You did? You guys didn't believe me. I know, I know. The dust last week in Lutwil in spots was as deep if not deeper than this. But you still just grip. And here even in this much of the dust the rear starts to slide and the front. You know you can't be aggressive with it. You're going by so fast and it's all bright white. And there's just loose rock everywhere. And you're like I remember what it's supposed to look like. But you're coming through and you're just guessing on these lines. Because you cannot see anything whatsoever. You're going to have to look really really far ahead. And you're going to have to be right on your feet. Even on that last run I maybe waited an hour between practice laps. And some of the ruts were just straight out of bounds. And I'm like you guys can't be riding over there. Alright dude, thank you. Good, a bit of puzzling throughout the day. It got a lot better as the day went on. We didn't go around in circles. But we were kind of like softening the fork, firming the fork, firming the shock. A bit of seesawing. I think previous year we ran a very similar setup to the Twill at the race. Probably in hindsight it wasn't ideal for the track. But it worked well for Nina. Because she'd just come off a successful result there. This time we strayed away from that a little bit. And it seems to be working really well on the track. She was struggling a bit with the traction. And kind of trusting the front wheel to get on certain lines. We tried a bit of everything. We didn't pinpoint it straight away. But then we dropped a bit of air pressure and that really did the trick. We actually lowered the bar height a little bit. And what are the vibes like with Nina today? The vibes are good. She's hungry for it. She's racing. So that's cool. Would you rather be riding this dusty blown out track or taking this thing for a spin over here? That's a tough one. Because I'm actually enjoying riding my bike at the moment. I've heard some riders say that this is maybe the most blown out they've seen a track in a while. Would you agree? Absolutely. I was struggling from the first lap on to find the flow. And that's usually not the case here. This track is pretty easy, pretty straight on. You're a bit like, okay, I've done three laps, let's race. But it wasn't the case yesterday. I did actually eight laps. Yeah, I was puzzling around with the setup. Yeah, we're getting towards something good. Yeah, your mechanic was saying you were going one way and then going the other. Kind of like seesawing a little bit. Just trying to find what works. It's funny, you literally called me on a weekend when I'm struggling with the setup. Which is maybe two out of ten races. Usually you're like a set and forget. Focus on the riding. And then I'm doing maybe one or two changes. Yeah, that was a bit better, that was a bit better. Let's crack on and just ride. But this time, we've done some geometry changes. And that affected the suspension again. So we first adapted the suspension. And then changed the geometry. And then had to change the suspension again to match the geometry. So I think that was the seesawing a bit. What helped in the end was going lower in the front. It's funny, Jordi actually said that he thinks if there's a track to go lower in the front, this is it. Just like high speed, not super steep. And you're coming from La Thuile, which is insanely steep. But then in our notes from last year, it said, or my notes said, almost no changes on the bike from Mathieu to Andorra. Okay, that's weird. But I mean, I won the race in La Thuile last year. So I was just pretty confident. And the track was easier to ride last year. For sure. Jordi's not here, where is he? He said call him if you need him. Yeah, I would. Vibes, what do you think? You feeling good? I don't feel I have to top speed. I definitely have a good speed. That's all you need for qualifying. Top speed is for tomorrow. Exactly. EAT, WORK, GYM That's my day to day I told you when I showed So please don't ask my ETA Beating up these beats I swear it's been VTA And I've been saying how I feel so much Don't need no PSA Telling you it's real But they think that it's fake Don't like to chat with GPT Despite my GPA Banned by my gala Blue and white collar I don't want a lamb Just a 96 Impala You heard the news, it's true I've been running laps around them Like a hula hoop You know it's due, it's due Hey, I'm level, blue or red Go right on through the matrix, I'm off You heard the news, it's true I've been running laps around them Like a hula hoop You know it's due, it's due Hey, I'm going through the matrix I think you need a lot of spice to today A bit more excitement I know, pretty close for comfort there You took a moment in the finish line What was going through your head there? In the first run in Q1 I got such tight forearms with the bottom And had to slow down quite a lot And then we actually added Compression again, so the fork's working less And the third run I was feeling like Oh yeah, that fork's much better, I'm getting way less fatigued And then I get further and further down I could feel coming into this last one Okay, now I'm getting a little tight, but it was all good Coming around one turn, so many loose rocks I almost lost it there, I was like And then literally out of those last woods Where Gracie crashed last year Had probably something similar to her Like had a little drift Braked Just saved it, but jumped so far left And jumped onto those rocks If that's it, no If that's it I'm gonna punch myself I'm glad I made it It's all to play for tomorrow Absolutely, I can sit in a hot seat for a while Hopefully Silver linings Nah, you have to take the positives I'm in We can work on some more speed tomorrow Get the bike fast, get me fast See you tomorrow Thanks Nina, appreciate it So it sounds like Birdie clipped a pedal coming out That final wood onto the road Clipped a pedal and then I just saw That little section of track Took out Gracie last year Took out Birdie yesterday and it's taking him again It's a cursed corner But man that was a big one Bouncing down the hill and then The rider following, it's not a good sight But he's a tough guy though So when he's hurt it's normally really bad Yeah We'll see how he goes