Singletrack

And finally, Keith, you made your name with pioneering steel mountain bike
frames in the 1980s and ’90s. Were those Bontrager OR frames really that
good? Or were you constrained by design, material or financial restraints at
the time? If you had to revisit the steel frame now, do you think you could do a
better job. We’ll assume that ‘modern’ geometry is a given…
They were that good.
If I made a steel frame now I would
make it with a different steerer tube size
and take advantage of a few modern
developments in tube forming. But
the bike wouldn’t be that different.
I would definitely NOT change
the geometry I used before. ‘Modern
geometry’ is a trend, not progress. There
are differences in the way a modern bike
and a bike made with shorter, steeper
angles handle. Each has its strong
points and its weaknesses. It would
not be an improvement for the sort of
riding I would do on a steel hardtail.
Keith might not have been making headlines like he was in the
1990s with his pioneering mountain bike designs, or when the
company sold to Trek in 1995, but that doesn’t mean he’s not
been busy. While other component designers are proud to show
off their latest carbon creations, Mr Bontrager’s ‘function first’
philosophy finds him testing the company’s bottom-of-the-range
components with the same focus that the whizz-bang bits get.
After all, an entry-level stem is going to sell hundreds
of thousands more units than any carbon one and
an error at that level would be catastrophic.
And, while you’ll see his name on all of those components
out there, Keith will mostly be at home in Santa Cruz,
tending the garden, getting on with quietly putting the
miles in and asking difficult questions of people who should
know better. And we’ll count ourselves in that number.
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