After the glitz and glamour of InterBike in Vegas and the sheer scale of Eurobike in Friedrichshafen, yesterdays trade preview day at The Cycle Show felt pretty chilled.
Collins Boy and I spent the whole day wandering around Earl's Court checking out the latest 2009 bikes and 'pressing the flesh' with folk from all over the UK bike industry.
There were quite a few stand-out bikes including the latest performance metal from Yeti, Iron Horse, Specialized and Cannondale to name but a few. We were really interested in a couple of new-to-the-UK brands too such as KTM, 2-Stage and Pivot.
Having visited their Austrian HQ a couple of months ago, it was cool to catch up with the KTM boys. With a new UK distributor sorted out and some really well specced bikes they're looking to do big things next year. They gave us beer too which we liked.
We featured 2-Stage's Elite-9 downhill bike in the current issue of MBUK and were really impressed. Their freeride and all-mountain machines look spot-on too and with manufacturing switching wholly to New Zealand they're on a mission for '09. They've also got the firmest handshakes in mountain biking.
Collins Boy was droolling over the new Pivot machines for a good half hour. Their approach to the DW-Link suspension system is an engineers wet dream and with a strong range they look set to be a regular down the trail centers.
The show also gave us a chance to get some new long-termers organised too (mostly for Jamer strangely) which you'll hopefully be seeing in the mag very soon...
After the bar was shut and they'd run out of sandwich's it was time for us to go. Rucksacks crammed with catalogues and a warm feeling gained from hurling abuse at some posers on fixies we left the big smoke and headed back to the safety of MBUK Towers.