I’VE SEEN FAST RIDERS BEFORE BUT SAM IS THE REAL DEAL
this isn’t the NFL, Sam isn’t in the same league (or sport, for that matter) as Brady, but the competition was stiff: Sam’s cohort on the GB squad consisted of Josh Bryceland, Sam Dale, Joe Smith and Ruaridh Cunningham, two of which – Josh and Ruaridh – would later go on to become world champions. “It wasn’t easy,” Sam says.
Despite that competition, he’d done pretty well at a national level. He finished fifth overall in the NPS downhill series in 2007, winning one race at Caersws as a junior. It was a long way from racing at Penshurst Bike Park in Kent, where Sam started out as a kid racing alongside his older brother, Phil.
“He was the reason I got into it, he’s six years older than me,” Sam says. “I used to go out when I was really young on a little hardtail. The first race I did was at PORC – I got the train from Redhill – on my brother’s downhill bike. I must have been 14 or 15. I rode there at the other end from the station, it felt like a long way on a downhill bike.”
Whether he won or lost that race is long forgotten, but what began was a lifelong love of bikes, and racing them too. Sam is now a bike designer at Whyte Bikes, responsible for award-winning machines like the G170, a bike that won our Editor’s Choice award in 2018 and scored full marks in every grouptest it entered, as well as newer bikes like the S150 and the brand’s e-bikes too. That continues right up to the present day, with the bike Sam’s riding on the day we meet up with him – a G180 29.
“It’s good to be out with other riders, but
I’m pretty used to riding on my own,” Sam tells us. Not many people want to ride the same track eight times in one day, testing out a myriad of components in the thirst for perfection, I add. “They don’t want to spend half an hour in between runs swapping out a shock either,” Sam agrees.
FROM DH TO DESIGN
We’ve come to the Forest of Dean to see first hand where Whyte’s award winners are crafted, although today it’s simple stuff like trying out the latest Rockshox Super Deluxe to figure out how it rides on an existing bike. True to his word, it’s half an hour in an offthe-beaten-track layby between runs, as Sam pulls his bike apart on what must be the most dilapidated workstand I’ve ever seen.
This is the bread and butter of being a bike engineer for Sam though; a big part of the job is testing, figuring out how improvements work in the real world rather than on screen. Sam was brought onboard at Whyte to do just this, develop the brand’s gravity or more aggressive bikes and make them competitive with other shop-bought brands. Specifically that meant working on suspension, kinematics, geometry and then shock tunes.
“I remember we changed around the pivot location quite a lot on the first prototypes for the G170,” he says. “We had the front shock mounts on the top tube and we cut them off and riveted them on in a different place. I think it only lasted one run before shearing off at Bikepark Wales,” Sam says.
Talk turns to racing, but he’s modest about his riding, it takes a fair bit of coaxing to get Sam to talk about racing at elite level on the downhill circuit, and later as an enduro rider. We stop to take some shots for the feature and it’s pretty clear that he doesn’t have to tell me about it. I watch as Sam slaps a series of waterlogged berms with the kind of speed and commitment you only see from pro riders. You hear him coming before you see him, then the roar of rubber on dirt changes to a slap of water and protest from the brakes, then he’s gone. Slap, hop, tear. I’ve seen fast riders before, great riders, but Sam is the real deal, part thrilling to watch and part frightening.
How do you remain so humble when you can ride like this, I can’t help wondering.
Partly perhaps it’s because he doesn’t think he’s actually at the top level. When we stop for something to eat I ask him the big question: why he didn’t go all-in on the racing, where so many other people would have and have done.
“Obviously I thought about wanting to go all in,” Sam says. What turned him away from that path was the reality check of riding with the likes of Josh Bryceland and Ruaridh Cunningham.
“I was basically racing in the year above because of my birthday, and when I found that out I felt like I was robbed of an extra junior year, which I was gutted about,” he says. “Maybe that was a good thing, because If I’d been in a year below I might have been winning more national races, or been in the top three consistently, which would have given me the impression that I was better than I actually was.”
He was good enough to race World Cups though. Heading to the highest level of racing without a place on a factory team is not without its difficulties though, and Sam didn’t do well. “I wasn’t prepared in terms of my equipment. I never felt like I was in form at the time – the first race that year was Maribor and my bike wasn’t set up that well. And I was doing a maths past paper between riding practice sessions,” he grins.
The support was missing too. As an XC rider on Team GB you’d be treated to a decent level of support, but downhill is a different sport entirely. “I was completely on my own, I had to buy my own jersey,” he says. “The only thing you get is access to the event – your entry. The right to be there.”
It got worse. The last round of that season was at Schladming, the conditions and track
ultimately dictated by its proximity to decent riding. “All my uni choices were in the west for the good riding,” Sam says “And I ended up choosing Cardiff over Bristol because I felt like Cardiff was where I wanted to be to get out. In my final-year Masters I think the only spot I rode at was Machen because it was the closest, only 20 minutes away.”
I ask whether racing took a back seat at university, whether he deferred the sport until graduation. Not really, he says. “The day after my final exam I drove up to Fort William for the World Cup round. I managed to get what I wanted at uni, but going to Fort William after a two-month exam period and not much time outside didn’t set me up particularly well.”
Sam did a work placement at Red Bull during the time, then afterwards Whyte got in touch to say they were looking for an engineer who could ride. “I think (our very own) Al Muldoon had recommended me to Andy Jeffries from Whyte,” he says. “Andy approached me on Linkedin, it’s actually a miracle I saw it because there are always a stack of messages on there that haven’t been
looked at for the past five years.”
The bike Sam would work on turned into the brand’s first dedicated enduro bike, the G170, and Sam is riding its successor today, the G180 29. The day we ride, he’s just returned from winning the enduro National Series in Kielder on it; it still has his race plate on the front so we stop to cut it off before snapper Roo can get any shots of it.
I’ve ridden a version of this bike before, and now, meeting Sam, I can really feel his influence on the bike. It’s incredibly low to the ground, the shock tune is spot on for racing and the geometry and sizing is about as big and aggressive as you can possibly get away with. Without a doubt, this is a bike built for speed – Sam’s designed a bike he can win on.
WHICH WAY HOME?
Are you proud, I ask? He doesn’t answer straight away, he thinks about the answer. “Not really.” We laugh. “The thing with being in design, by the time it’s actually released it’s old and boring to me because we haven’t worked on it for two years,” he says. “It’s cool when something you’ve almost forgotten about gets 10/10 in a magazine or something, when you get good reviews it’s really exciting. But by the time that’s happened, I’ve moved on.”
We head back to the van but incredibly can’t help but get lost on the way back, trying to cut through from one of the rocky trails we’ve been riding on. Sam assures us he really has been riding here for years, despite this. He’s easy to like. There’s absolutely no bulls**t in what Sam says – the man’s modest but without being falsely deprecating about his riding or his work. And he’s worked incredibly hard to get where he is. After the ride we head back to Sam’s house to drink coffee, check out his Heath Robinson garage gym, the campervan he’s been building, and meet his daughter Anna, who’s just turned 20 months old. I don’t know about earning $270 million, but Sam Shucksmith’s life is certainly rich.
HE’S EASY TO LIKE. THERE’S ABSOLUTELY NO BULLS**T IN WHAT SAM SAYS