Now THAT Was A Bike:

Nico Vouilloz's Sunn Radical+

For bike nerds, there is one bike that separates the early days of downhill from the modern era. That bike is Nico Vouilloz's Sunn Radical+, designed by Olivier Bossard. It marks the change from the wild experimentation as the sport found its feet to bikes really working in a way that we would still appreciate today.

There is so much on this bike that we almost take for granted today - things like adjustable chainstays, high and low speed compression adjustment, an angleset or offset frame layout - yet in the late 1990s this was the highest end of World Cup exotica. Part of the explanation for this is the approach they took - they tested, timed and tweaked with a focus on outright performance. There were no focus groups, no marketing people to appease, the only thing that mattered is how well it performed on track.