Bike
Custom solutions and set-ups – here are all the details on Emil Johansson’s latest MTB slopestyle bike – as used at Crankworx Rotorua.
With two out of three wins this season, Swedish slopestyle magician Emil Johansson heads into the final Crankworx Slopestyle stop as the star of the show. And he does so on a brand-new bike specially designed for New Zealand, including a custom Kiwi-inspired paint job and some slopestyle-specific component solutions.
The eight-time Crankworx winner explains the ins and outs of his bike setup as well as why he, and the rest of the slopestyle crew, have to run custom solutions on their bikes to make it work with their sport.
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Emil Johansson explains his bike
The frame: “I run a Trek Ticket S, where S stands for slopestyle. It’s specially designed ahead of this round to match my 'theme of the year’. My signature shoes, saddle and stem all run the same colour scheme. I’m extremely nerdy when it comes to my bike set-up, and that includes the designs as well.”
Suspension: “I have 100mm suspension in the front and 80mm in the rear. I run 200+ psi in the fork and around 300 psi in the shock. That is on the limit of what I can run without blowing it up, but despite that, I always use all of my travel during a contest run. I also run the slowest possible rebound on my forks. It’s so that when I come into jumps with a lot of speed and pressure, it doesn’t kick back and create a different type of rotation than normal.”
Brake setup: “I guess our brake setup is kind of interesting for those who don’t know about it. In slopestyle, we only run a back brake, and it’s a mechanical setup with a gyro in our headset, connecting the cable from the rear calliper to the brake lever on the handlebars. It makes it possible to spin our bars as many times as we want and in both directions without the brake cable getting all tangled up. This way, there is way less for us to stress and think about when dropping into a slopestyle run”.
Cranks/BB setup: “Another pretty geeky thing that I don’t think that many are aware of is the special bottom bracket (BB) and crank solution we run in slopestyle. On normal MTBs, you want your cranks to spin freely without any resistance in order to produce as much watt and power as possible, but as slopestylers, we don’t want that. For us, it’s important that the cranks and pedals stay in the same position during a trick. For example, when we remove the feet from the pedals during a trick, we want them to be in that same position until we put the feet back on to land. To do so, we’ve modified our BB to create friction and pressure on the cranks so that they don’t spin or move a lot. It’s pretty neat.”
Saddle setup: “I run my signature EJ saddle from Sixpack. It’s very important to get the saddle height right, just around knee height, so that when I let go of both hands, I can easily grip the saddle with my knees to keep contact with the bike.”
Gears: “You normally don’t run a derailleur with a single-speed setup, but I need one in order for my chain to not break on impact when landing the big jumps. When landing a big jump, the chain gets longer, which increases the tension, which could make it snap in half. That would not be very good during a competition run”.
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Emil Johansson’s Bike Setup:
- Frame: Trek Ticket S
- Fork: RockShox Pike Ultimate
- Shock: RockShox Deluxe Ultimate
- Crankset: SRAM X01 Eagle DUB with 32t Chainring
- Cassette: Singlespeed w/ freecoaster hub
- Chain: SRAM XX1 Eagle
- Derailleur: SBONE G3 Tensioner
- Rear Brake: Odyssey lever with gyro and SRAM Avid BB7 Road caliper
- Rotors: SRAM Centerline 160mm
- Wheels: Industry9
- Handlebar: Sixpack Millenium
- Stem: Sixpack
- Front tyre: Maxxis Ikon 26’’ x 2.1
- Rear tyre: Maxxis Pace 26’’ x 2.1
- Saddle: Signature Emil Johansson Sixpack
- Pedals: HT Supreme
- Grips: Signature Emil Johansson Sensus
