The Dark Side

It’s pouring rain, "I Got Bitches" by A2M is bumping on the sound system loud enough to be heard a hundred yards away, where 600 racers are hunkered down in tents for the night, and Fraser Newton is about to tear into a complete Chris King rear hub overhaul. It’s 3 o’clock in the morning.

At the other side of the mobile shop, Nick Kemp is performing a damper rebuild on a Fox DPX2 shock, while Eli Relke pauses his Santa Cruz VPP linkage service for a 20-minute power nap.

When the sun comes up a couple hours from now, the owners of the King hub, Fox shock and Santa Cruz bike, along with a couple hundred other racers, will find their steeds in the bike corral, cleaned, repaired and ready for another grueling stage of the 2019 B.C. Bike Race.

Welcome to the dark side of BCBR, where racers’ dreams of the ultimate singletrack experience come true overnight, every night.

For each of BCBR’s 13 years, North Vancouver based shop, Obsession Bikes, has joined the seven-day traveling circus, with a mission to keep bikes, battered by BC’s brutal singletrack, in the race. “We’re here so that nobody needs to drop out due to a mechanical,” says Newton, who takes on the role as ringleader of Obsession's 13-person BCBR Tech Team naturally.

In many ways, Obsession is the circus. Or the life of it, anyway. It’s where Brett Tippie comes to hang out at 2 a.m. when he’s hit with insomnia, where the big-rig truck drivers responsible for getting the bikes, bathrooms, showers and tents from place to place come for a cold beer, and where the security guards who watch over the bikes all night come to get out of the rain and topped up on coffee. And it’s where around 60 percent of BCBR racers will come for parts, supplies, service, advice, or just to shoot the breeze, throughout the course of the event. Obsession and its nonstop party is the lifeblood of BCBR.

A Rolling Bike Shop

Being the service center for BCBR is a massive undertaking that begins long before the race kicks off. It takes an unreal amount of supplies—$250,000 worth—to be equipped to repair any bike that might come into the tent. These parts don’t just come off the shelves of the store in North Vancouver, they’re ordered specifically for the event and tailored to the types of bikes racers are bringing with them. One’s that, since BCBR is a rather expensive race to enter, tend to be quite high-end. This is Robert Whishaw’s wheelhouse. Whishaw works full-time at Obsession in North Van, is responsible for the inventory on board the rolling shop that supplies racers with bike-saving parts and one of the 10 sleep-deprived mechanics wrenching during the event.

All the parts and accessories are accounted for on a spreadsheet managed by Whishaw, are then packed neatly into parts bins and loaded onto a huge box van that Obsession rents for the occasion each year and builds out with a complete shelving system to keep everything organized and accessible.

At the event each day, the full setup consists of a 20x50-foot workspace made up of 10x10 tents, complete with walls, rain gutters, electricity, compressed air and the banging sound system that keeps the party going all day and night long. There are at least eight workstations under the tent, plus a bike wash station run by soft-spoken Matt Dickson of Powell River, who just happens to be a master auto mechanic. Why Dickson chose to come along to power wash bikes all day and night is a bit of a mystery. Even though the job is a crucial one, and Dickson did a phenomenal job, it’s not the type of work most individuals with his particular skillset would be down for. The monotony of running a power washer for hours on end can be quite meditative, he admitted. But really, it’s about the crew, comraderie and the pure love of working on bikes.

The Magic

It’s why everyone who’s part of the Obsession BCBR Tech Team comes back year after year. Why they use up vacation time at their day jobs to come spend a week getting no sleep, not riding and being yelled at by Type A, spandex-wearing racers who think they’re the only person on earth. It’s a tight-knit group that’s been doing this event together for years. At day one, everyone already knew exactly what to do, as if this was their full-time gig.

Two couples are part of the crew and have been so for several years. One couple actually got engaged at the event this year. Congratulations Matt and Charlotte! These two took time off their jobs outside Toronto, which include running a second-generation bike shop started by Matt’s father, to spend more time around bikes.

At three years in, Stu Gold is the newest mechanic on the crew, but he fits right in. Then there’s Karel (Charlie) De Wael, who comes from Belgium each year to be a part of the madness, and Daniel Fritz, who likely turns wrenches better than any other University of British Columbia employee. There’s Hazen Simson and Nick Kemp, who run a business called Bike Therapy, which provides race support packages for multi-day mountain bike races all over the world. These guys live this life all year long, and instead of taking time off of their own grueling schedule of race support, they come along and provide some of the most critical service on the team. As a Fox Factory suspension tech in New Zealand, Kemp can handle any suspension issue that comes in, and he’s quick, too.

Eli Relke and Sarah De Bourcier, of North Vancouver, have been at it for years as well, both of whom are full-on bike nerds, even though Relke’s current day job is as a welder and metal fabricator. Here at BCBR, Relke wrenches while De Bourcier, along with Charlotte, work the front of the shop, handling customers as they come in, and making sure racers are paying their bills for service and merchandise, much of which is provided on the honor system, with little more than a name, number plate and phone digits.

That’s part of the magic of what Obsession is doing. Racers walk up with zero form of payment (spandex shorts don’t have pockets) and need service, or Co2, or whatever, and instead of denying them, Obsession hands over the product and does the work, trusting they’ll come back to provide payment later on, with nothing but a bib number to track them down. But they continue to take that risk, because it’s all about getting riders to the start line each day.

Obsession is actually a completely separate entity from BCBR; a business inside a business. BCBR does not pay Obsession or the crew they bring on. Every cost—the parts, labor, equipment rentals—it all comes out of the shop’s pocket. There’s no guarantee the shop will have any return on its investment. Despite the fact that while at BCBR, they’re operating in a captive market, much like a food vendor at a baseball stadium, Obsession does not mark up its prices for parts or labor. It probably should, because taking a shop on the road like this incurs significant costs, but they don’t because they don’t want to be the dickheads charging 30 bucks for a Co2 cartridge just because they can. This is about the love of the sport, not the money. There’s a true passion, shared by everyone who’s part of the operation, to get each and every rider to the finish line.

The Energy

It’s loud. Even in the wee hours, music is blaring on the stereo. An eclectic mix of everything, but with a bias on high-energy electronic beats pump party vibes under the canopy of the mobile shop. Between this, the sleep deprivation, Baileys-spiked coffees, beers, blunts and constant hilarious banter between the crew, the vibe could be described as a mix between a rave, a comedy club and a library. At any given time, half the crew could be dancing, laughing, singing and playing off the numerous inside jokes they’ve developed over the years of working this event together, while the other half could be so concentrated on their projects that you could hear a pin drop in the silence of their focused minds.

There’s an overarching, unrelenting sense of positivity, respect and teamwork that is shared throughout the gang. Even when it’s 3 a.m., and they've just finished all the tickets, but now have to tear down the whole setup in the pissing rain, drive to make a 5 a.m. ferry to get ahead of the race, in order to set back up at the start line, then tear back down, drive to the finish line, set the whole shop back up again, and continue working through the next night, and then the following one, with only brief moments of rest, they’re still a jovial, fun-loving, supportive group of people. The hours are longer than that last sentence, and the energy is still positive.

When someone is crashing and there are 50 tickets left to go, nobody gives that person shit. They let them get a wink of sleep and the group takes up the slack. There’s no ego or resentment-driven ball-busting because everyone is on the same team. When one mechanic gets stumped by a bike, others step in to help, without attitude, because it’s on all of them, not to just get the work done, but to get it done at an extremely high level, no matter what time it is or how many tickets are left in the pile.

The energy isn't one of wanting to win or be a part of someone else's race victory. Actually, the team could not have cared less about what was happening in the race. Nobody mentioned it a single time, nobody went to see the start or finish of any of the stages. I actually don't think a single person on the crew has any idea who won the thing. For Obsession, it's about making sure everyone is stoked on their experience at BCBR, whether they're racing seriously or just out for a seven-day leisure ride. Everyone gets the same treatment, the same level of attention, no matter how fast or slow they are or what kind of bike they're on.

Above and Beyond

The team will do anything in their power to keep the bikes rolling, and it’s astounding what’s in their power.

Like, for instance, repairing broken carbon frames in the field. Yeah, they do that. Hardly any bike stores in the world perform a service like that, so you certainly wouldn’t expect a mobile one, with limited time and resources, to be able to. But the BCBR Tech Team operates at a different level than ordinary shops. This is triage. We’re not talking about the type of repair that Calfee or Rucks Composites performs, where you can’t tell where the break was to begin with. This is more of a splint. But the repairs have consistently held up long enough to get racers through the seven-day stage race, and beyond.

I think that’s part of why these mechanics keep coming back, year after year, despite the torture they endure during the week. They get to solve problems with real creativity and ingenuity, without the limits experienced under ordinary shop conditions. It’s a high-pressure, high-reward sort of environment that makes this group of wrenches really come to life. They get to be heroes.

Here’s a scenario that might not happen at any other shop: A racer comes in with a brand-new Intense Sniper XC bike. It turns out, the upper swing link is made out of a composite material that’s not nearly strong or stiff enough, so steel pivot bearing races wallow the composite bearing seats out every day, making it necessary to replace the link every day. Intense is apparently aware of the issue, and sent the rider a handful of links to bring along with him to BCBR. When Whishsaw sees this, rather than accepting it and just going ahead and replacing the link for the guy every day, he decides that he could modify the link itself, by adding a supporting structure to it. He set out to improve the bike, and it worked. This was on day two, and the repair lasted the rest of BCBR. Even more impressive, the rider reported that the bike rode better than it did off the showroom floor. The modification made the rear end of the bike markedly stiffer, improving the bike’s handling, and giving the rider more confidence for the next five days of racing.

Sometimes, it takes a village. Because BCBR is such a boon for the BC bike culture, and because Obsession and Bike Therapy have such strong reputations, the inspiration to go above and beyond can be contagious. This year, after it was discovered that a faulty repair stand had destroyed the upper stanchions of quite a few dropper posts, the crew got in touch with Race Face/Fox/Easton/Marzocchi service manager, Eric Lalonde. Lalonde, who lives locally, and who also happens to be a pilot with his own bush plane, volunteered to fly parts and tools out to where the race was on the Sunshine Coast, along with Obsesson’s owner James Wilson who brought more posts from the shop, to fix the affected posts. Kemp then worked around the clock replacing the upper stanchions on all the scratched Fox and RaceFace posts. It was the shop’s mistake to fix, but I’m not aware of any shop that would go to such lengths to fix a problem they created. The situation probably cost the shop thousands of dollars, but there was not a hint of animosity or anger toward anyone. It was just another problem that needed to be solved.

Back under the work lights and a falling moon, Newton finishes his King hub overhaul, Kemp, his DPX2 rebuild, and Relke, his VPP service. The sun rises as crusty-eyed racers slowly emerge from their tents, unaware of the magic that happened on the dark side of the BCBR.