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00:00Welcome to Race Bikes, the show that takes you deeper into the world of
00:18mountain bike racing through its fastest machines. These are the bikes that
00:22redefined what was possible, pushed the whole sport forward and allowed the
00:26world's best riders to achieve the seemingly impossible. These are the bikes
00:32that matter the most. My name is Rick McLaughlin, I've been lucky enough to work
00:38in mountain bike media for nearly 20 years and I am a dyed-in-the-wool massive
00:44bike geek and over the course of the series I'm gonna be traveling around the
00:47world to track down, dust off and get hands-on with some of the most important
00:52two-wheeled projectiles to ever grace the racetracks of the WHOOP UCI mountain bike
00:57World Series.
01:04Santa Cruz bicycles, the sunshine practically blasts out of the name itself,
01:09doesn't it? The coolest of cool bike brands from the very epicenter of cool itself.
01:15California, the Pacific Ocean, sunshine, dusty trails and that's why I'm here, in the north of England, in January,
01:27in the ice and snow.
01:30Over the course of this series, we've found these bikes in perfectly curated collections, in museums, in bike company headquarters, but this is the first one that we've tracked down to what its owner refers to as the man cave and to be honest with you.
01:59It's a pretty decent man cave as well.
02:12Downhill racing is all about the fastest rider from A to B, down the side of a mountain, flat out, through rock gardens, huge jumps.
02:21These are the toughest bikes in the world.
02:24And when it comes to downhill racing, names from America, France, Switzerland, South Africa, they're all painted so large.
02:32But in terms of Britain, there is no bigger than a lanky lad from Chapel Town in Yorkshire, Steve Peet.
02:39I was promised a man cave and there is a man himself.
02:45Steve, how are we getting on?
02:46The man cave.
02:47Good mate, how are you?
02:48This is, yeah, your man cave is bigger than my house.
02:50I'd give you a little tour, eh?
02:52Beers are over here in the fridge.
02:54Come on, let's look around first, have a little beer, right.
03:01Your skill becoming an internationally respected sports personality from Ecclesfield Parish Council.
03:07How good's that?
03:08Great Britain in the 1990s.
03:10P.E., Britney Spears and the Lamborghini Diablo dominated bedroom walls like no others.
03:16Steve was Britain's fastest two-wheel export in the formative days of downhill.
03:21He partied with Palmer, did battle with Julio and won his debut UCI Downhill World Cup race in Snoqualmie in 1998.
03:29He won nine UK national titles, 17 UCI World Cups, stood on 52 podiums and won a trio of UCI World Cup overall titles.
03:41But there was still one trophy missing.
03:44The UCI World Championships.
03:47I'm Steve Peet, I'm 50 years old.
03:50I ride for the Santa Cruz Syndicate and I live in Sheffield, England.
03:54In mountain biking, the UCI World Championship is the creme de la creme.
04:09If you're new to cycling, it can take a bit of getting your head around.
04:12The UCI World Cup is a year round championship, whilst the UCI World Championships are a one race for all the marbles,
04:20wherein the winner takes home not only the title, but the right to wear the UCI World Champion's rainbow stripes on their jersey for the rest of their careers.
04:29It's a huge deal.
04:31Any form guide was suggested that by 2009 it may just have been too late for Pete.
04:37A new generation had arrived and it had been three long years since his last title.
04:42It was good.
04:43It was hard.
04:44About to collapse.
04:46But finally, after 17 years of trying, Steve Peet, at the age of 35, was crowned UCI World Champion on Canberra's Mount Stromlo.
04:57And this is the bike he captured the hallowed rainbow stripes on.
05:02I'm excited to see this. I've never seen this bike.
05:05No way. There it is.
05:06That is the bike. That's the 2009 UCI World Championships winning Santa Cruz V10.
05:12That's the one. Took me a while, but we finally got there.
05:15It is, of course, the third generation Santa Cruz V10 in a very special red, white and blue paint job.
05:24It's a little bit dusty.
05:26It's just a special thing, isn't it? Look at all the size of the rear disc.
05:31Well, that's a 140. I think the front's a 160, maybe.
05:34There was hardly any braking on that track in Canberra, though. Didn't need them.
05:38Were these a downhill casing?
05:40They were, yeah. Yeah, they were the downhill semi-slick, yeah.
05:44What does it feel like sat on it?
05:45Feels like it's not been sat on for 16 years.
05:48When you win a world championship, everybody in the whole wide world knows who the world champion is in that sport.
05:59I didn't really think about it too deeply until it happened to me.
06:02I couldn't believe what it meant to everybody, everybody in the sport, but also outside of the sport.
06:08People would come up and if you put world champion before your name, they're all of a sudden like, oh, wow, he's world champion.
06:15I'm sure he'd never mention it, but the rider he beat that day was his Santa Cruz syndicate teammate, Greg Minard, by just five hundredths of a second.
06:25I felt like my biggest threat at that race was Greg. He was my teammate. I know how fit he is.
06:30I know how big his lungs and his legs are when he's like getting on top of the pedals and carrying speed.
06:37He's amazing at that. And he was my biggest threat.
06:40To lose by such a little bit, you know, just racing, you only have one chance of world champs at that point.
06:45Trying to fix it, just got to do it all in that run and Steve did it today. First time in his career. It's a moment here. It's an awesome time.
06:52Be able to beat him and smoke him by 0.05 of a second is something that I look back on and kind of mentioned to him quite a lot.
07:02Steve ends up winning it by half a second. I didn't even know it was close.
07:06It was five hundredths of a second. Yeah.
07:08Do you think five hundredths qualifies the word smoked?
07:11Yeah, it definitely does to Steve.
07:13Steve was just simply fast. To me, it looked like it didn't matter what was going on with the bike, how it was handling or anything else.
07:26He was just fast. He could carry speed like no one else. And if it got tight and twisty around trees, he was even quicker.
07:33You've never had someone so tall and large, but you can ride so close to a tree and feel confident.
07:39And I remember seeing him in practice and just nailing through the rock gardens on the first run and just solid and fast.
07:47And I was like, well, I've got another line on the outside, but I'm just going to keep riding on the inside so no one else knows this line.
07:54And it was just the wrong way to go about it. And Steve just got such a good track pace going.
08:00And by the time I'd switched to my lines, I was quite far off.
08:03It's interesting in downhill because, you know, really you're racing the clock and not the others.
08:08And you want to win. You know, Steve had raced his whole career and been so close so many times and hadn't quite done it.
08:14To see that he had done it was really special for everyone in the finish area.
08:21Aside from the Commencal Supreme, no other downhill bike has done as much winning over the years as the Santa Cruz V10.
08:29Over two decades, in fact, since it was first introduced. The looks have changed a lot since then.
08:35But the two things that have remained constant are the ease of use and the clarity of purpose that racers around the world love.
08:43The Santa Cruz Syndicate team was launched in 2006 with the aim of becoming the number one professional downhill team in the world.
08:50Steve Peat was one of the original team members and won the UCI World Cup overall title that same year.
08:57The Dave Allen designed third version of the V10 was introduced the following year and would serve the Syndicate well until 2011 when an updated model arrived.
09:06It was an exciting time for downhill bike fans as they continued to get more extreme in terms of geometry and gradually started to lose the heavy weight of the early 2000s.
09:16The first time I got on the Santa Cruz V10 was 2006 and as soon as I got on it, I knew that it was a bike that I could just sort of change my riding style a little bit, plough a little bit more.
09:30The bike I was on previously, I had to be a bit more precise and use the bike a lot more to generate speed.
09:38Whereas the Santa Cruz, you could just plough a little bit more, but it was still maneuverable.
09:42Steve's UCI World's Winning Santa Cruz V10 is the third version of the bike, which means it's an all aluminium construction of the frame apart from this carbon fibre upper link of the suspension.
09:55Now, when the V10 was introduced in 2001, it was a collaboration with Intense and it used a then groundbreaking technology called Virtual Pivot Point.
10:05What this allowed the back wheel to do was to move through its suspension travel via two instead of one pivot.
10:12The result was much more controlled for the engineers in terms of the suspension quality and the characteristics of the bike.
10:20When I got onto the Santa Cruz with the VPP, I just felt right now the suspension actually works properly and I can use the suspension to help me ride quicker.
10:31The name V10 itself actually comes from the fact that the very first version of the bike had a huge 10 inches, 254 millimetres of rear wheel suspension travel.
10:45The latest version has 208, just over eight inches.
10:50And that gives you an idea of just what an extreme machine the first one actually was.
10:55The third generation of the V10 was made in Portland, Oregon, with Steve's race bikes getting custom length front triangles to accommodate his six foot three inch frame.
11:0520 millimetres was added to the length of the stock front triangle.
11:09If you know these bikes well enough, you can sort of see the stretch in this one too.
11:14Whereas most modern downhill bikes run either a 29 inch front and a 27 and a half inch rear wheel or 29 inch wheel all round.
11:23In 2009 it was 26 inch wheels for everything, even for riders Steve says.
11:30Pretty much through all my racing career I've been six foot three.
11:33Now I'm 50, I've lost an inch and a half.
11:35How do you think you've lost an inch and a half?
11:38We did some testing with the syndicate athletes last week and I measured myself and I was six foot one and a half.
11:44Like where's that gone?
11:46I would say going back to my cross country days and my start in mountain bike, I always rode quite a big bike anyway.
11:53Cause I was, so I'm quite long limbed for a long leg, long armed.
11:57So an XL bike would always suit me.
11:59We were aware that the bikes were small, but we were also pushing the bikes at that time and pushing the companies that we rode for to make the bikes bigger.
12:09So they were, they were growing in size slightly each year, but not quick enough.
12:15Steve has actually had one of his V10s from 2006 out lately for his YouTube channel and raced it against his latest bike.
12:22The old bike was only seven seconds across a two minute track slower than his modern machine.
12:28It gives you an idea of just how cutting edge these things were at the time.
12:33Another little custom touch that Steve benefited from in Canberra is hidden away right here.
12:40For that season, the Santa Cruz syndicate team bikes had a slightly different CNC lower suspension link.
12:47Why?
12:48Well, syndicate riders were traveling faster, bigger impacts needed a bit more support from the back end.
12:55Now in downhill brands have always had a bit of a cagey relationship with buyers wanting exactly what the pros are racing on.
13:03When in reality, maybe we don't need it just as much.
13:08Whatever.
13:09Santa Cruz figured that this little part here was a neat little way of giving their riders that little extra boost.
13:20The bigger the name, the more flamboyant the UCI wireless paint job.
13:24Let's be honest, some can be better than others.
13:27This red, white and blue number though works so well in the big V10.
13:31No complicated flag motifs or weird themes.
13:34Just block colors faded neatly into each other.
13:37I was the one that started pushing it from early on.
13:41I'd want to go red, white and blue because it was British colors.
13:44And so I did start pushing like, oh, it's world champs.
13:48Remember like, let's go a little bit deeper on the bike and find some cool like different colored parts and stuff.
13:54The frame was new for the race in Canberra, but things have been going well that year.
14:00Steve has started strongly with abrasive wins in France and Andorra, but a 38th at the round before the UCI world championships had him out of many pundits predictions.
14:11I think after 2008 in Valsal when I thought it all aligned for me and then it didn't happen.
14:18I think I gave up after that point.
14:21I sort of gave up.
14:22I'm like, that's it.
14:23I'm never going to win a world championship.
14:24The track in Canberra lacked gradient and big technical features, but demanded high speed precision.
14:31Steve and his mechanic Ricky dropped the front end as low as possible to put him right over the front axle.
14:37Low over the top tube and aggressive with his inputs.
14:40And it was a real pedaly track.
14:42The bottom of the track was so flat, quite hard to carry speed.
14:46A lot of sort of pedaling to carry speed over stuff to make the jumps and keep going.
14:51Carrying speed and not allowing for a single break in momentum is essential in downhill racing, but especially so on that particular track.
15:00Look at the details all over the bike.
15:02You can really see that no stone was left unturned.
15:06Both front and rear suspension units were adjusted to be firmer and more responsive than what PE would normally have run.
15:12More air went into the fork and they fitted a stiffer rear spring to keep him moving forward.
15:18I think a mechanic is a massive part of any downhiller's sort of results and preparation for a race.
15:26When you're in the start gate, you have to know that you've got 100% trust in what that mechanic has done to your bike.
15:32How he's set it up, how the bike feels. So it's huge.
15:35Most of Ricky's work went into these very special race day only wheels.
15:44Look stock, they are anything but.
15:48I got Ricky Bobby to nitromose the rims, he'd scrape all the white paint off and then he'd hand polish every rim before he built the wheels up.
15:57So I wanted silver rims on that bike and Ricky Bobby did it for me.
16:01Then he built them up with aerodynamic bladed spokes and lightweight alloy nipples.
16:06And then came the real attention to detail.
16:09Steve's race day wheel set had all the grease stripped from inside the hubs and all the dust and weather seals thrown in the bin.
16:17In an attempt to make them as friction free and fast rolling as possible.
16:22For like a world's race run, one run only, we would take the seals out of the hub.
16:27We'd put some thinner oil in there so that they just ran a lot quicker.
16:32We'd try and get one practice run on them so you knew actually you could feel how quick they were running.
16:37And then you'd just save them for a race run.
16:40And yeah, Ricky would strip them down, clean it all out, make it just run as fast as possible.
16:46Brakes rubbing.
16:50Can't tell how fast the hubs are.
16:52It's been sat up there for 16 years.
16:56This wheel set had one job to do, one race run.
17:01Absolutely no compromise whatsoever.
17:04But look at the size of the ding in this rear rim.
17:08I did, I felt that in that rock garden and I was kind of gritting my teeth for a little bit like praying that it would stay up.
17:15And get me to the bottom of the hill, but yeah.
17:19Once I got out of that rock garden, did the next couple of turns, I knew that I'd not lost any pressure and it was on.
17:25Wrapped around the custom wheels are a custom pair of Maxxis tyres.
17:30The front is a high roller, but if you look carefully, every single knob in the centre of the tyre has been hand cut down by a couple of millimetres.
17:39Whilst the outside tread is uncut, providing Steve with all the cornering confidence he'd have been used to, but with a slightly lower rolling resistance.
17:49Check out the rear tyre, semi-slick, pretty much unheard of in downhill before or since.
17:56And when it comes down to that five hundredths of a second, every knob on here, every little detail added up perfectly on the day.
18:04I had a lot of experience on that sort of Maxxis semi-slick. I used to race the Lisbon Downtown on it every year and I knew that I could use it on that track because it was quite dry and there was always like little edges to catch and stuff and it obviously rolled really well.
18:19Lizard Skins PE lock on grips. Now these were everywhere in the UK scene in 2007 when they were first introduced and they still make them today.
18:28If you look at the grips on Steve's bike, you can see the collars have been worn down right on the edges from where his hands were sat right out there in Canberra.
18:37In terms of brakes, Steve's set up for Canberra owed more to cross country than downhill in many ways.
18:42160 and 140mm discs alongside lightweight, lower stopping power levers and calipers were used as, although the speeds were high, Steve actually didn't think he'd be touching them that much.
18:54So he went for the lightest setup possible.
18:57There wasn't a hell of a lot of braking on that track, so I put 160 rotors on, just put little cross country rotors on and take a bit of weight out of it. So rolling weight was better.
19:07These cranks bear SRAM's black box prototype logo, but not only were they prototype, they were prototype prototype.
19:14Already in development, these cranks were a one of one set, which were hollow compared with what had gone before.
19:20Show me a bike geek that says they don't like titanium and I'll show you a bare face liar.
19:26Other than three individual bolts, every bolt and washer on this bike is made from high grade titanium.
19:34It's a very nice feeling, knowing that I won World Championships on it.
19:38That bike and me were at one on that track.
19:41It was ahead of its time at that point and it helped me to win that race.
19:46So, yeah, it's got a special meaning to me and it's made up of loads of different components and all that stuff, but when you get it down and you touch it and you feel it, it feels great.
19:56In its modern day form, the 8th generation of the V10 is the weapon of choice for a modern day hero.
20:03Jackson Goldstone won two elite level UCI World Cup races in his first season in 2023 and struck a golden double again in Ludenviel and Liagang in 2025.
20:15That Ludenviela race was won by five hundredths of a second.
20:21And who was there to congratulate him at the bottom?
20:24None other than his team manager and mentor, Steve Peake.
20:30You can't give enough credit to what Steve has done.
20:33You know, he does everything that the people don't get to see.
20:36You know, he's up on track helping.
20:38He's helping with lines and, you know, he really just helps get you in the right mental space and fire it up for a run.
20:44And, you know, he's got so much experience on his end that, you know, any issues you go with him, he knows the answers.
20:50The syndicate is definitely, you know, not the syndicate without Petey.
20:54I wish his name somehow was in the syndicate, but it's not.
20:58But yeah, no, it's, you know, he's just been a part of the program for so long and, you know, he just knows the ropes.
21:05So, yeah, it definitely wouldn't be the same vibe without him.
21:11This is the bike that cemented Steve Peake's legend status.
21:16And it's been a real privilege today to get so close to it.
21:20And it's just the singleness of purpose for this bike.
21:24In my eyes, this is the ultimate UCI world champs bike.
21:29One run to rule them all.
21:38And that's why I love the Santa Cruz V10.
21:41Yes, you've got the full factory team bikes, the Santa Cruz syndicate bikes like Steve's we've looked at today.
21:46But I was lucky enough to be on the 2013 launch, the first full carbon one.
21:51And I was just shocked by how approachable it was and how easy to ride it was.
21:54And they always have been.
21:56They're not a big, scary thing that you'd think a factory bike would be.
22:00They're the practical supercar.
22:02They're the running spikes you can walk the dog in.
22:06The V10 is one of the best downhill bikes of all time.
22:10And that is probably one of the most special V10s.
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