Sea Otter - The Gathering!

All the boys from Team ChainReactionCycles/Intense have been out in Temecula, the home of Intense, for the last week riding and preparing all their bikes for the start of the season. This is the first time the team has all been together - although mechanic Cord is stuck back in England working on the finishing touches to the race van, nice one kid! With all the different charactors on the team, it is great to see how well everyone gets on - and we are really glad as it seems the jigsaw is finally piecing together!! Chris is riding amazing this year and was really going off the other day. His DH riding scaring the crap out the guys but I believe that Ruaridh and Matt will learn a lot from him this year. Julien is fast and very focused - his all round professionalism will teach the younger guys a few things about becoming a top World Cup rider. For our Sea Otter preparation, we have been doing some DH runs in the Californian dust and riding the pump track that Chris and Claire built. We also went down to Ted Williams riding spot for DH and jumping. Matt hit up a big 35' gap jump first and sailed over it with a nice lazy dirt jump style. All the other guys then hit it up and everyone looked real smooth. Jeff Steber from Intense and worked his ass off and got us all our new M6 frames ready and Dave, our chief mechanic, has been absolutely pinned all week - building every ones bikes, sorting suspension and getting everything dialled in. Victor Lucas has been with us all week taking some amazing shots so look out for those in an upcoming Dirt issue - but during the weekend, keep checking out our Sea Otter gallery as we will be uploading pix as and when we have them... We are now at Sea Otter for DH and Slalom. The first DH practice session was Thursday morning, we have another one this morning - then Slalom is Saturday and the DH Sunday. So check back after the weekend to see how the guys do. The DH track has a lot of pedaling but good fun and has some cool jumps. Matt and Chris are using Socoms, Ruaridh is on an SS and Julien is on his M6 for DH. Check out www.CRCintense.com