Spoonrobot 

Now you know

ETA: For joking


"Serious" comparison

tFUnK

A flatbar gravel bike is what a 90s hardtail mountain bike should have been.

​​​We could have gotten there by just putting flat bars on cyclocross bikes, but we ended up going to drop bar gravel bikes first.

Oftentimes I wish I had a nice low-travel suspension fork on my flatbar gravel bike - I wonder if we'll move into that direction. Really makes me want to pick up a Cannondale Slate and slapping on some flat bars.

Why not just get a modern front suspension hardtail, you might ask - I think the reach is too long and the stack is too high.

Spoonrobot 

The current low-trail suspension forks are sublime. If they can get the weight down it would be a no-brainer for a lot of builds. Consumer resistance and the current state of the bicycle economy will most likely preclude much more development, which is a shame.

Eric F 

Both of those bikes have some uncommon features for the era they supposedly represent. Yes, they are from those eras, but not examples of typical setups.

Spoonrobot 

That's the joke, thank you for visiting the thread.

Polaris OBark

Dropper post and suspension fork.

Spoonrobot 

Nice 1990s road bike, we've finally caught up to where we were 30 years ago

tempocyclist

I seriously considered the GRIZL when looking at a new Gravel rig. I think a short-travel suspension fork would be great on some routes around here.

Eric F 

Is that was this was supposed to be? Oh. Okay.

Spoonrobot 

There's a great recent article on the MTB: https://www.theproscloset.com/blogs/...macs-yeti-c-26

It ended up as a wedding gift to the editor of MBA, with a sad conclusion to it's life before fully becoming a museum piece:

I get it, but wow I'd have been trying to rip it up like Tomac had I gotten the bike.

Eric F 

Cool story. I got a chance to talk to hang out and chat with Zap before the Belgian Waffle Ride this past April. Nice guy.

unterhausen

I still don't get the joke. But design trends for mtb have been towards downhill and very rough terrain, so it makes sense that the industry would make a bike like older mountain bikes, which were generally made for terrain like a gravel road.

Spoonrobot 

That's ok, it's not for everyone

They released a video too, what a great looking bike

Polaris OBark

Spoonrobot 

I think Dave Mac's 1984 Team Stumpjumper is more C&V aesthetic and not quite so alien, but the Yeti is just from another world. Hardcore 1990s energy and signaled the end of the prior generation of rigid steel bikes and the future of MTBs that were completely divorced from road bikes and clunkers in form and function.

Spoonrobot 

And now we're back here in 2023. So different but so much the same.

Eric F 

Sort of, but not really. Dylan isn't racing this bike at the top level of MTB racing the way Tomac raced his Yeti. Dylan is an experimenter, playing with marginal gains. This is a bike intentionally built for a middle ground between where a rigid gravel bike is more efficient, and where a full-squish XC MTB is more efficient.

Spoonrobot 

Racing Leadville and Chequamegon on a drop-bar Factor MTB is a straight line connection what Tomac was doing in 1990 with the Yeti. A difference of degree, not of kind.

UCI banned drop bars for MTB so it's a moot point anyway. Nobody is going to be exactly like Tomac because now it's illegal.

mstateglfr 

Dont worry about not being in on the joke- Spoon is very meta in both his humor and his analysis of the bike industry, consumer use, and consumer preferences.
Its a constant joke within a joke sort of commentary where you cant figure out if the person's comments are genuine, ironic, or post-ironic. Frankly, I think most of his commentary is post-irony since that allows the flexibility to always 'be right' and always criticize whatever subsegment of the overall cycling industry and consumerism that gets in his sights in the moment.
Posting constant post-ironic commentary gives cover and allows someone to create the joke, laugh at those who dont get the joke, and ultimately still earnestly believe the subject matter when it suits them...while then immediately being able to claim that is now the joke.

I saw this thread yesterday shortly after it was first posted, looked at the examples, and passed since it was a trap to laugh at those that dont get 'it', whatever 'it' may be in the moment.

Rant over, for now.

Polaris OBark

With some very minor re-wording tweaks, you have successfully characterized 95% of the posts on BikeForums.net.

Eric F 

Dylan is racing his drop-bar hardtail MTB on those courses because they are technically mild, and there are enough opportunities to get a reasonable benefit from aero advantages of a drop bar. It's a course-specific decision. Again...sort of the same, but not really.

Spoonrobot 

You should make a comparison image explaining the differences. Those go over really well here.

msu2001la

MTB racing has changed a lot since the 1990's. The tracks that Tomac raced on in the early 90's are very tame by today's MTB race standards. In the video above, he even admits that the bars were a disadvantage on some courses back then, particularly on the downhill sections and really only worked well on the XC portions. If you watch videos of MTB racing in that era, it looks a lot like modern day gravel or cyclocross racing. The courses were mostly wide open gravel and grass, with a few jumps here and there. They didn't have rock gardens, ramps, huge drops, etc.

Drop bars work on this:


They aren't going to work very well on stuff like this:


Or this:


or this:

Spoonrobot 

That wasn't my intent and I feel like you should know.

I had thought more people had seen the commentary that "gravel bikes are just 1990s mountain bikes" but I suppose not. Figured a comparison would be funny since they're so different but I guess it fell flat.

mstateglfr 

Oh.
Well yeah I see that dumb claim all the time across the forums of this site, so I bet many here see it a lot. I didnt connect that. I just went back to your first pic and see that the modern bike pic changed. I didnt get it when you had a flat bar model. Now that its a drop bar, it makes more sense. I figured you were commenting on bikes both back then and now and were showing slightly how they are actually similar too, due to the flat bars.



^ me for sure.