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00:00Welcome to the last in the first series of race bikes and don't be sad because we have got the coolest mountain bike of all time. My personal favourite waiting for us. Just a small matter of 24 hours away. Yeah it's pretty far. We are going to South Africa.
00:30Welcome to Race Bikes, the show that takes you deeper into the world of mountain bike racing through its fastest machines. These are the bikes that redefined what was possible, pushed the whole sport forward and allowed the world's best riders to achieve the seemingly impossible. These are the bikes that matter the most.
01:00My name is Rick McLaughlin. I've been lucky enough to work in mountain bike media for nearly 20 years and I am a dyed in the wool massive bike geek. And over the course of the series I'm going to be travelling around the world to track down, dust off and get hands on with some of the most important two wheeled projectiles to ever grace the racetracks of the Whoop UCI Mountain Bike World Series.
01:30Morning, I think. First flight done. We're in Dubai, which seems to do a lot of designer handbags but very little on the way of breakfast. So I'm going to go try and get that sorted out. Then I've got a couple of hours to kill and then it's on to Durban.
01:47This is the last episode of the series and from the moment we first started planning it, this is the bike that I've been champing at the bit to see. I am literally nervous about going to see an inanimate object.
02:03OK, so we're in Peter Maritzburg now, on the way to Greg Menard Cycles. I've just texted somebody one of the best combinations of words I think I've ever committed, which was bike shop, coffee, Honda.
02:22Honda. I know what you're thinking. They make motorcycles, planes, lovable humanoid robots and yes, they do. But not mountain bikes. Well, in 2004, they did. They made one of the only Hondas ever without a motor. The RN01 Downhill Bike.
02:43Honda are a company steeped in motorsport pedigree. They've been racing on four and two wheels under the Honda Racing Corporation banner since 1946 and they've had big successes along the way.
02:57But every time they create a machine purely to go racing, once it's done its job, more often than not, they crush it. It's gone.
03:05Competitors can't steal the technology or pick one apart to find out why it was so good. It's simply gone.
03:13Under a dozen RN01s are thought to have been built. Only four riders ever raced one at UCI World Cup level and only one survives today.
03:25And that's what brings me to the bike shop owned by its former pilot and now custodian, Greg Menard, here in Peter Maritzburg, South Africa.
03:34Well, after nearly 20-some hours in the travel ringer, I am finally here at Greg Menard Cycles in Peter Maritzburg.
03:44And through the foliage, you can just see the very rare sight of an actual Greg Menard.
03:51Hey, Ricker.
03:52Greg, how are you doing?
03:52Welcome in town, bro.
03:53How are you doing? Good to see you.
03:54I'm back.
03:54Greg, this is my first time in Peter Maritzburg, but there has been UCI World Cup and UCI World
04:00Champs just over there, hasn't there?
04:02Yeah, so I was born and raised here. It's a humble, small town.
04:06Very hot.
04:07I've noticed that about it already.
04:09I have been a massive anorak and fan of the bike in there, and I may emit some loud, high-pitched
04:22noises when I see it. These are involuntary noises, and I want you to feel comfortable.
04:26Like a whale.
04:26Like a whale.
04:26Yeah, like clicking and stuff. But I'm very, very excited. Should we go and have a look at
04:31it?
04:31Let's go.
04:32Go, Ricker. Go have a look.
04:35As long as the high-pitched whale noises you've got.
04:37I don't actually know what to think. I feel odd, Greg. I feel really weird.
04:43I feel really weird standing next to you.
04:47I'm just, yeah, I'm just blown away by it. It's what I thought it would be, but more.
04:54So before we get into all the little details that make this bike so special, we need to
04:59talk about what it is we're actually looking at here. This is the last Honda Greg ever raced
05:05on UCI World Champs in Fort William in 2007. It's the fourth version of the RN01. They
05:11constantly updated them throughout the seasons. They raced them. Martin Whiteley is team manager
05:15at G-Cross Honda, then negotiated with Honda that he be gifted this bike into his custodianship.
05:21He has to sign a piece of paper every year to say that he's got it. It's Honda property,
05:25and he's looking after it. It is a bit like Indiana Jones. There may well be one tucked
05:29away at the back of a big warehouse somewhere in Honda land. But from what we can find, this
05:35is the last of the RN01s in existence in this garage with us right here, right now.
05:42We signed with the Honda Racing Corporation, which is a company set up to run all of their
05:47race programs from Formula One activities to MotoGP, Motocross, everything. The origin of this
05:52was one engineer hired a bike in Big Bear and rode downhill for the first time. He was a skier and
05:58he thought he'd try it. And he got to the end of it and he said he was hurting in his face from
06:02smiling so much. I want to design one. And so he was working on that in his private time.
06:07And then the head of two wheels saw him working on something. He said, what's this? He said,
06:11let me take you to Mount Fuji in a couple of weeks and I'll show you. They went on downhill bikes.
06:16And this guy was in his late fifties at the time, the head of two wheel.
06:19Mazuta-san took him and said, what do you think? Can I work on this? He said, go ahead. I think this is
06:24really up our alley. I think we can do something with this. So their origin came from stumbling
06:29on something. And suddenly within a year and a half, two years, they were winning World Cup races.
06:34Honda have obviously always done things really well. And when they announced they were going to have a
06:38mountain bike team, you knew that they'd be coming in with some tech and some new sort of
06:44approach to the sport. And it was massive. The downhill bike was ahead of its time and
06:53nobody's really done the same thing since.
06:59Honda had said to me, you know, they wanted to build a bike to race
07:03and they wanted me to lead the way on developing it. The winning Ford Williams was great. You know,
07:07first race of the season and then winning the American national title in 2004. Then in 2005,
07:14winning the World Cup. It was really cool. Really good experience.
07:17Would you test this in Japan? Yeah, I used to fly over quite a bit and straight away,
07:22first run. How did this feel? What happened here? It's like, oh, I'm just trying to learn the track.
07:28For them, this was more of an exercise of how can we improve? What can we do better? And so it was the
07:32first time I'd really seen engineers at the finish line corral waiting for Greg or Matty to come in
07:38and say, what was that like? How did that feel? What can we change? Every single run was logged.
07:43The weather, the temperature, the altitude change, everything in mechanic workbooks that they had to
07:50submit at the end of each race. One thing I didn't know about them, they made a like a knocking noise
07:57because of all the bits in here. We can test it out. It's kind of an odd noise. I didn't really
08:05realise that at the time. The most famous thing perhaps about the Honda RN01 is this, the internal
08:11drive unit. Now, what's the biggest problem of mountain bike transmissions? They're external,
08:15the gears are external, they're exposed to mud, rock and everything in between. Honda came up with
08:21this incredibly simple solution. When the bike debuted, everyone assumed it was dark magic,
08:26MotoGP inspired. There's still lots of rumours about what was going on here. What was actually
08:31happening here was brilliantly simple. They took a derailleur and a rear mech, shrunk them and moved
08:36them in here. The bike is a constant drivetrain, which means that no matter what the weather is doing
08:41or where it is on course, the bike shifts perfectly and it can be shifted without the cranks turning,
08:46allowing its riders to tee up perfectly for every corner jump and drop. It also took a load of weight
08:53away from the back axle, which meant that the suspension worked better and that brings me on
08:58to suspension. Showa, another Japanese company, worked hand in hand with Honda on the project and
09:04they left at the same time too. Typically the bike ran between 180 and 190 millimetres of suspension
09:10travel, so a good bit less than what its competition were running. Upside down fork on the front,
09:15massive coil rear shock on the back. But that is the most race fork I have ever seen. Look how
09:21racey it is, like it's just like that's not, that's not an uplift day fork. That is a mountain bike race fork.
09:26This was the last fork, the first fork we had was carbon fiber stanchions
09:30and we're testing this out and I believe it was just before MotoGP went to use them
09:35and then my teammate was Matty Lahiko in it. Yeah. And he was messing around on his bike at home and he jumped
09:40off a wall and the carbon stanchion tube broke and ripped out. So now they had to revise everything
09:47because they said it's not really safe. Yeah. And I'm going well he's kind of jumping off a wall and
09:51it's not the same. It's not the same but anyway they're going to move to more production style
09:55fork and this is where we ended up but that was probably a inside story that I possibly shouldn't
10:00have shared but I thought it was pretty good. The original idea behind the RN01 which stands for
10:05racing natural for all you turbo geeks out there was to make the frame out of carbon fiber but they
10:11went with this polished aluminium alloy instead and it's an intrinsic part of how the bike looks and
10:17you cannot think of this bike without thinking of its internal combustion stable mates. You know
10:23whatever they did in the styling of that bike really worked well I mean it's incredible how that
10:28bike looks good today and and we know it's going to look good tomorrow it just stands out it's beautiful.
10:33One of the things I didn't realize about the RN01 before I got hands on with it was just how much
10:38bespoke Honda stuff is on this bike. The hubs, the fork crown believe it or not, the stem, the plastics,
10:46everything's Honda including the cranks. The team originally ran Shimano XTR numbers but they were bending
10:53too many of them. So what's the solution? Make your own 170 mil CNC numbers. You're Honda, why not?
11:00What are you, what are you demonstrating here Greg? Tops. Wait Greg, I want to see you squeal like a
11:07dolphin again. I don't want to squeal like a dolphin Greg. Oh I've got it, come look at this.
11:12You've got one. So all the, all the graphics on the bike had multiple layers so when they polished up
11:16the frame they could just peel off the top layer and then have fresh graphic underneath again.
11:23That's the detail they're into. No way, absolutely. There's tear-offs. There's tear-offs on the decals.
11:29Yeah. We're deep into perhaps one of the most mind-blowing details of this whole series. In
11:36between runs mechanics will be able to clean the bike quickly, polish up the alloy and then peel off the top
11:41layer of clear fill-in so the graphic stayed in the right place and always looked sharp. That has blown my tiny mind.
11:49So this skid plate was all my idea because the frame was so chunky and aluminium being quite soft
11:55through a rock section would actually bite. Yeah it would dig in. So this was a way to to slide
12:00through rocks or over rocks when when connected. So yeah like an actual skid plate as opposed to just
12:05protection. Yeah. I think that's one of the things that I'm really excited about seeing the footage from
12:11this. It's actually angles like this that I've never seen this bike in. I've only ever seen it
12:17online with pictures side on and you kind of don't see how beautiful a thing it is. I'm absolutely
12:21buzzing. I'm so like you're embarrassed by this. You don't you you've not seen this. I'm like
12:28No, this is another level of geeking out that I've probably never seen.
12:32I'm enjoying that record. Don't get me wrong. I'm loving it. The level of testing we did with
12:39telemetry we'd never heard of such a thing you know. So we had telemetry. We had all this stuff
12:45in real time. We set up a track in Queensland our first test in 2004 and there were sensors down the
12:52track and then that was relayed back to a laptop and we could see the stressing of the frame and
12:56now this is science fiction in 2004. We had two decoy ones so two that weren't exactly right
13:05at either end of the test area chained to trees so the media came up and snuck a photo of it. They
13:11got the wrong one. The plastics on the RN01 are a big part of the looks of this bike and the front one
13:18in particular changed a lot over the years. The front fender hardware in motocross spec nylon. Originally
13:25they were carbon fibre but the team used to break two or three per race each and at $600 a throw even
13:32if you're Honda that starts to add up. We had a carbon fibre mudguard that had to be on the bike
13:37in all conditions to give it that look. I think that defines the bike. Any photo you see of it,
13:43it has that. So that for me was yeah when I saw the replacement costs it's like why are we doing this
13:49you know like and also just chrome you know who was doing that. Honda knew that this bike was
13:56always going to be slightly compromised on flat sections due to the drag of the transmission system
14:01so it had to do everything else better than anything else. They even experimented with different
14:07grades of titanium and alloy for the frame fastenings themselves to make this thing turn and react to
14:14rider inputs better than anything else out there. These guys are brilliant they'll have like frame
14:19analysis of the different thicknesses of frame and different parts of the bike different torque
14:24settings for for every bolt and you know we adjust this one of the things we adjusted was this nut we
14:30went from a titanium nut to an aluminium nut just to get more flex out of the rear end. I know throughout
14:35this series lots of people won't really get it you know it's just a thing it's just an object but
14:41honestly as a bike geek I haven't stopped smiling since I first saw this thing it's got an aura about
14:47it look at any other bike from 2007 and they can look a bit spindly a bit awkward this thing looks
14:54every bit as aggressive and special and shiny as I ever hoped it would. They say never meet your heroes
15:01but it's bollocks. Meet them. I thought it'd been serviced the suspension the ceramic bearings the
15:08internal drivetrain unit everything works and it sat for 15 years they've not touched it. This is how
15:14high quality this bike is I've waited my whole career to see it and it looks and feels even more
15:20aggressive and purposeful and still relevant today as I kind of ever hoped it would.
15:25this is one of those things you're not going to care about but first time I ever saw you race was
15:39the last time you rode this bike 2007 Fort William worlds and I stood there in the rain you rode past
15:47your shoulder was it out then or was it okay well I just had a big run yeah it wasn't a great race
15:52I've known the great race for you but I'm trying to hang on to a romantic moment here because for me
15:57this is a really weird thing of going from a fan at the side of the track obsessed with this bike to
16:02now stood here with you and in South Africa it's pretty cool. I'd broken my scapula and dislocated my
16:10shoulder and I was in the hospital but I knew this team dinner was important to be at because I knew it
16:14was where it's going to be announced and so I was trying to rush the doctors to put my shoulder back in
16:20we had a bit of an argument of which way the shoulder dislocated eventually that's called a
16:25specialist from Inverness who drove through and that's like an you know what an hour and a half
16:30away so it's just chewing into my dinner plans and finally I just said well just give me this gas
16:36stuff and let's put it back in because it's definitely out the back and we've got shoulder
16:40back in and I shot off to dinner for this final announcement. We always knew or I always felt there
16:45was a finite project so somewhere along the line I think they decided that they'd learned everything
16:50they could from it. I've never seen so many grown men like crying really when they decided to to can
16:58the project you know I believe it was just one guy who didn't feel it was necessary to sell a mountain
17:04bike and that's when they put it into the program so. It's one of the great what ifs isn't it because
17:13that approach to manufacture and that approach to how you run a race team if the sport had had even
17:18five more years of that yeah what what would be different now? For sure. I think it was a shock for
17:23the fans because they they got used to Honda being a mainstay in the paddock and when you see the longevity
17:27of teams like you know Santa Cruz Syndicate now it was a very short window. I think there's so many Honda
17:33fans out there that would love a bike so it would have been interesting to see where they'd gone
17:39with like the next version the updated version like how they would have tackled that new style
17:44of rider coming through Sam and and the Sundae and who knows where it would have gone but I don't think
17:50they would have just sat there and you know done nothing about it. I mean look at the way they've done
17:54this carbon tower it's it's the sea tower it's it's incredibly well built we had so much stuff and
18:01and so much access to stuff yeah um that we're working on you know this this shocks it had a
18:06red you can see the little it's a shock so we we had a shock that because through the gearbox the
18:13the pedaling is quite bad and back then we had a lot of pedaling and down and we found we could
18:17save about half a second out the gate if we had electronic lockout yeah in the shock so we had a
18:22little button little battery pack sat under behind the number board you can actually see the volcro here
18:26where it stuck on there behind the thing and had a little flick of a button so now we look where
18:33downhill's got to now people have gone back to adding electronic lockouts and what have you onto
18:38the shock so I mean we were really pushing the boundaries back in 2007. I think that's what's
18:44really interesting and now in your your sort of new role as a team manager and developing a bike
18:50like this thing in many ways like in 2007 like an internal drive train I know okay
19:00on a geek level it's not the same thing technically as a gearbox
19:04but it feels like it's taken everyone else nearly 20 years to get like
19:08to come with something that can work yeah
19:10think outside the gearbox you know think outside the box they just took something and turned it
19:19on its head and said you can do it this way too you know when I saw them come in I thought okay
19:24everyone's going to be running gearboxes in five years and we're going to have a lot of other sponsors
19:28coming in that's what I thought we're getting there now I think you know that will be the future
19:34of this sport I do believe that derailleur and the and the shifting and stuff of a bike is still
19:42a weak spot so that's probably one of the next things that could could change and become better
19:49explain this to me then so you could shift without pedaling on this like a gearbox but it was constant
19:55drive so the change cut the chain constantly spins yeah so essentially running two chains and that's
20:00what made cause a lot of drag so this external chain ran constantly so you could shift through the
20:06gears did you did that change much to how you ruled it like would you look at different corners
20:11whatever and think I could dump two gears it was more efficient because you could you know get into
20:14right gear for when you needed to pedal yeah a lot of time in in the early 2000s or even the mid 2000s
20:20we were like trying to pedal out of or pedal on some flat sections or whatever it was and you kind of
20:25select the right gear and so it was efficient in that way but did it drag then on flats the drag
20:33was heavy everywhere yeah um so like uh to me it was the rolling speed um was really once you're
20:39pedaling it it wasn't too bad you just keep hiring through it but once you're coasting i felt like a
20:43bit of drag shortly after honda's arrival nissan sponsored the world cup that's no coincidence
20:49you know you're judged by the company you keep so people say why are honda in this
20:52space why why shouldn't we be in this space so a big name like that coming into that space
20:58brings others it's you know the lamborghini poster on the wall kind of thing it just keeps kids
21:05impressed amazed by our sport i think our sport is one that does generate a lot of interest for
21:11younger people and this is the bike that they wanted on their wall and with that then my time
21:17in peter maritzburg has come to an end and race bikes first series off it has come to an end too
21:23and i've been all over the world in the search for the ultimate race bike and for me the honda rn01
21:30simply is the ultimate mountain bike unicorn it's my grail bike it was everything and more that i hoped it
21:38would be and it's going to take a little bit of getting used to the fact that i don't get to see it
21:44every day like i have done for the last couple of days but there's no bike can match what it stood
21:50for what it was and the fact that there's only one of them left and i've had to come all this way to
21:54this amazing part of the world to see it just makes it all the more special thank you for enjoying race
22:01bikes don't forget the whoop uci mountain bike world series will return to your screens imminently
22:06in the meantime go and ride your bike and enjoy them
22:23you
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