12 hours of 'down-country' - why wouldn't you?

12 HOURS OF 'DOWN-COUNTRY' - THE RIDE
It's been a long time since we've been able to ride in organised events and it’s left many riders -ourselves included - hungering for a challenge to push body and bike to the limits. Combine that with the fact that we’ve had hardly any chances to put our new NINETY-SIX to the test on a racetrack and we decided to create our own event instead. Taking inspiration from the expanded ability of the NINETY-SIX to blur the line between a focussed race bike and the new breed of ‘down-country’ machines, we decided to do a 12 hour endurance event, but with a twist – we’d do it on tough and technical enduro-style trails to create '12 hours of down-country'.

Freed from a racecourse, it meant we could ride our favourite trails over and over, picking and mixing the best bits from an epic riding location. The only aim - to survive 12 hours of technical trails and huge climbs; the perfect challenge for us and the race-ready NINETY-SIX RC XT EDITION and the more trail focussed NINETY-SIX 8000.

Click  HERE to watch out 12 hours of 'down-country' video. 

To learn more about the latest NINETY-SIX full-suspension cross-country bike, please click here.

12 HOURS OF 'DOWN-COUNTRY' - THE AFTERMATH
If you’re creating your own riding challenge that’s designed to push bike and body to the limit, there’s only so much planning you can do before you just have to commit and start riding into the unknown. After coming up with the idea of riding the new range of NINETY-SIX cross-country bikes on technical and tough enduro trails for 12 hours to prove the bike’s down-country credentials, actually doing the ride proved to be a bit of a learning curve.

In this video, we'll share the top five things we learned from our 12 hours of 'down-country' adventure so you can learn from our mistakes if you fancy creating your own riding challenge.

Click  HERE to watch what we learned from our 12 hours of 'down-country' challenge. 

12 HOURS OF 'DOWN-COUNTRY' - THE BIKES
The new range of NINETY-SIX bikes have been proved to be hugely capable cross-country and down-country riding contenders, with a whole host of press awards and great review results. However, when it comes to getting the bikes tweaked for an epic 12-hour mission of riding seriously tough enduro trails on a bike with just 100mm of rear-wheel travel, there were a few tweaks that we decided to make so that the bike and riders would have an easier time.

In this video, we cover the tweaks we made to the stock setup of both the race-focused NINETY-SIX RC XT EDITION and the trail-ready NINETY-SIX 8000, with tips on tyres, gearing, comfort and more.

Click  HERE to watch what we did to our NINETY-SIX bikes to make them even more suitable for our 12 hours of 'down-country' challenge.