Have your cyclocross pit exchanges gone stale, or worse yet, cost you precious places during the race?
It might be time to get creative on your approach to swapping bikes or wheels, and save seconds while making it easier on your pit crew. And we’ve got two videos that will show you how.
Not all of us are fortunate to have pit bikes waiting for us in the pit, and sometimes spare wheels are all we have to make sure we can make it to the finish line. Other times, we’re lucky to have neutral wheel support at the races, and even in this day of disc brake and thru axles, may still find a compatible wheel to swap in to continue and finish the race.
Need to swap out your rear wheel after a flat? Don’t bother getting off the bike, leaving a mechanic or pit crew member to crouch down, fumble with the bike, and try to balance it at the same time. Anders Bregnhøj’s video below shows us a better way, assuming you have someone waiting with a wheel:
Think such an approach in the pits takes too much time, or too much balance? There’s a faster way, if you have a bike waiting for you.
Exactly a week ago, we shared DIG BMX Magazine’s amazing video of Pat Laughlin’s daring bike exchange, and it certainly was one of our more viral posts recently, reaching over 40,000 of you and was reshared many times. Laughlin, launching off the “Big Daddy” ramp at a BMX park in China, literally jumped from one bike to another, and if we could only have ramps leading into the cyclocross pits, cyclocross just might find its way into the X-Games. Have a look (again) below:
Good luck with practicing that technique and still having kids later. But with 22 million views, that video might hold the secret to getting cyclocross seen by more eyeballs. And with many courses already featuring flyovers, if we just moved the flyover to the beginning of pit lane…
