Nick, thank you so much for joining us. Welcome to the Pink Bike podcast. You're not long back from the IXS European Cup in Fort William. How are you and how did the weekend go?

Yeah, thanks for having me on. I'm good. It's a bit of a long drive, but I've recovered from that. Fort William was not

disappointing. The weather threw some curveballs on the race day. Up until then it was pretty good,

the weather-wise. The racing was brilliant. A lot of conversation about the new grass sections

and changes to the track and some action off the road gap.

But, yeah, it didn't disappoint.

Yeah, I'm not sure if that grassy section

is going to stay in for any possible future World Cups.

But what did the writers think of it?

They found it challenging. It was, it's always nice to see changes, especially on a track

like that, which is fundamentally the same, mostly. I think they, yeah, it was definitely

challenging. That's what most people's feedback was. It was a challenge, especially as as the weather turned as well they were just starting to get to grips with it and then it down pulled on race day and it was mayhem yeah some pretty uh exciting uh reals up there on instagram um which i have to watch uh between the and my fingers, to be honest.

But yeah, it makes for some exciting racing, that's for sure.

So what were you up to personally?

What was your role at the event there?

So I was there with the steampunk downhill army,

which are a team based in Scotland.

I'm there to, when I'm at the races i'm there

sort of helping with mechanical stuff not strictly just a mechanic we were running data acquisition

on a friday and saturday so helping two of their riders with that the other two riders we were

kind of using a lot of rider feedback and they're younger riders, so it's important to help them sort of grow that skill

set about communicating what the bike's doing and how they want it to perform. So yeah,

...