Innovation - 10 July 2025
Episode 4: A.200.G Gates Belt Bike: Relentless Change
Poland, Leogang, Loudenvielle, Val di Sole… and now La Thuile, the pace of racing in 2025 is unreal…
In this episode 4 of our docu-series charting the development of the A200.G Gates Belt-drive bike Charlie Hatton, mechanic Ben Lovell and Atherton Bikes CEO Dan Brown share some of the pressures involved with developing a prototype bike in such a relentless season where the new format, the closeness of racing and the variety of both track and weather conditions could, perhaps even should, demand a racer’s full focus…
Charlie said, ”This whole season has been crazy fast, and the new format with only the first 20 going through in Q1 and only around 3.5/4 seconds between those top 20 riders is more pressure than ever… having to ride again in Q2 in Poland took years off my life!"
Ten World Cup rounds in a season leaves very little downtime to focus on development and progressing the product but CEO Dan Brown said “The boys are doing an amazing job, Luke grabbed that top 10 at Loudenvielle, Charlie the 12th in Leogang and our Junior rider George Madley delivered his second top 5 and 4th top ten of the season this weekend. That they’ve been able to achieve that on a prototype bike that’s continuously changing deserves all of our respect".
With a field so competitive, a new format almost universally acknowledged as highly stressful and a new mix of tracks and weather conditions, riders need to be up to speed from practically their first run.
Charlie said “There is a trade-off between progressing the bike and spending more focus on choosing your lines etc… getting fast this year been a tough process, we’ve achieved so much in a short time, four World Cups deep the bike feels great, but that last couple of per cent is going to take more time."
The smallest question in terms of bike set up makes a huge difference when times are this tight, the tracks are so different this year and the weather has been so changeable that finding the perfect set-up for a track is way more complicated, I don’t even know if there is such a thing as the perfect set-up!
In Leogang for example, the bike felt too soft at the top. It’s so fast in that top section you almost need the bike to be firm so you can pump to generate and carry speed, but when you get down into the woods, it’s the opposite… I lost time at the pretty tough top - partly it was due to my riding, partly I had the bike set up well for max grip in the woods… It’s a tough balance, but we are getting there.
Over winter in the Dyfi, Ben and Charlie also worked hard on “mud mods”, basically just keeping the mud out of the belt so it never derails. In this episode, they report they’ve never had an issue, thanks to their (rough!) mouldable plastic prototype and now a much neater version from the design team. Similarly, Ben shared that until the boys rode Fort William, they hadn’t realised the need for a bash ring… Nevis Range showed them how wrong they were!!
Going back to the kinematic and ride feel, Charlie said, “We’ve found that things that feel nice for me to ride are slower on the clock – and that if I’m going faster, the bike needs to be firmer. We’ve been working closely with the guys at Fox who have made the suspension so tunable now that it’s difficult to know whether we should change the suspension to change the kinematic of the bike or whether we work on the whole platform of the frame which is a bigger step… we have decided a range within which we can work with the suspension, outside of that we start doing stuff on the frame… The A.200.G is still very much a working prototype – we’ve only had it for 7 months – we were still tweaking the A.200 after 5 years, so there’s still a lot to learn and a load more stuff to try!"