Posts
3178
Joined
6/26/2014
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FR
Edited Date/Time
2/13/2024 12:16pm
I have just watched a very nice interview of Cyril Neveu, 5 times Dakar winner and more or less the pioneer and first superstar in this new field back in late 70s early 80. It was interesting, and just at the end of the interview, of course after talking about several sad moments, he was quite happy to see the evolution for bikers regarding gear.
Dakar is not my cup of tea since I lost my first mx teacher, but it remains the pinaccle of off road, with probably 100 million mainstream viewers, so what do we do to make SX/MX, which is I think 10x better, both safer and actually more appealing to the mass ?
Poll
Airbag is a difficult one because there’s currently two main ways companies are doing it: tethered and non-tethered. Both have their ups and downs, but for MX (and especially SX), those ups and downs are quite extreme. The risk of having false positives with a smart system is that it can deploy without needing to, and in theory would be just as dangerous as crashing without one, because those deployments are quite violent and could knock someone off the bike imo. Same goes for the flip side of tethered systems, crashing without pulling the tether first also defeats that purpose. I will say I would love to see this technology implemented in a way that makes sense. It has certainly been a game changer for on-road use.
Another issue arises with restricting motion and we’ve seen gear become as low profile as physically possible for SX riders to allow for comfort on the bike. They all wear roost guards at least, and most have knee protection of some kind. Would making more gear mandatory help with injuries? Maybe. Would they all actually want it? I’m doubtful.
Anything else you’ve mentioned, unfortunately, would be up to Feld entertainment to spend the money on. They’re not huge fans of spending money when not absolutely required to. 2023 was catastrophic for injuries and what have they done for this season to try and mitigate that? I don’t see much, and haven’t ever since the nets went up.
Ejection seats and parachutes
Not a fan of airbags for moto/SX. I think radios would be a good thing, a perfect example is Jordan Smiths miscue with Levi. His spotter could have alerted him to back it down for the blinking lights he obviously missed.
We sure see a lot of ground shaking get offs each week. It amazes me more guys don’t get carted off after some of these hits….its a brutal sport
I couldn’t bring myself to vote!
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Could bring in outside money too. Martin-Baker Monster Energy Kawasaki has a nice ring to it.
Thrasher has a patent pending on the ejection seat, need to work on the parachutes though
Post a reply to: Safety debate for SX ; airbag? radio? tuff block? whatelse?