Hello and welcome to the Pink Pike podcast. I'm Alicia and I'm here today with

Kaz and Dario to catch up just a little bit before we head into the main episode.

It's definitely hitting the slow

part of the season right now with racing kind of over in the Northern Hemisphere and even the

talk about racing dying down, but we did see the latest version of the UCI rulebook come out recently.

Nothing in that hit me as very groundbreaking, but it's interesting that we'll probably see

world champs for

Enduro, E-Induro, and snow biking this year, which does seem like a change.

But I don't know if there's anything in that to really focus on.

So jumping ahead to tech, I kind of also wanted to ask Henry about those birdwheels he's

been running lately, but since he isn't here, I want to focus on what you guys have been up to, because I know you've been riding really

cool bikes too. Dario, I heard you might know things about the transition smuggler. What's going on

with that? Yeah, I spent the better part of the summer into fall riding the smuggler, I mean,

amongst a bunch of other bikes bikes but definitely got a lot of

time on it went through a set of bearings pretty quickly but definitely had a lot of miles i really liked

that bike um just a good well-rounded trail bike did all the things i wanted it to do climbed well

descended well um i think my chief complaint about it was came down to frame quality.

Just little finishing touches, really, that all, I'd say all of the other, like, premium brands are offering at this point that transition isn't.

And when you're paying the same amount that you'd pay

for a Santa Cruz or for a specialized then you know I think that you kind of can expect those

higher touch points do you think that stuff affects the ride quality or is it more just a principal

issue of like spending that much money on something without the finer details?

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