Exclusive interview with SRAM's Chris Mandell discussing the new XPLR line of product for gravel.  We dig into the SRAM XPLR components, the RockShox REVERB AXS wireless dropper post and finally RockShox's new gravel suspension fork, Rudy.

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Full automated transcript (please excuse the typos):

SRAM - Chris Mandell  

[00:00:00 ] Craig Dalton: Craig Dalton. Hello and welcome to the gravel ride podcast. I'm your host, Craig Dalton.

[00:00:08 ] We've got a big show for you this week. So I'm going to keep the intro short. I'm welcoming Chris Mandel from SRAM

[00:00:14 ] To the show to talk about the new explore series just launched today, August. 

[00:00:19 ] This is really three shows in one, as we talk about grupos dropper posts. And suspension forks.

[00:00:25 ] I'm super excited to dive into this conversation. I've been testing the products a few weeks down here in Topanga, California. And really excited to bounce my ideas off of Chris. 

[00:00:36 ] And get his insights about the new XPLR line. 

[00:00:39 ] So with that, let's dive right in. 

[00:00:41 ] Chris, welcome to the show. 

[00:00:43 ] Chris Mandell: Thanks for having me. I'm real excited to be here. 

[00:00:45 ] Craig Dalton: This is a conversation that I feel is eight or nine months in the works. 

[00:00:49 ] Chris Mandell: Yeah, for sure. That's that's generally how these things go, your word developing and working on products for quite a long time before they actually make it out into the world.

[00:00:59 ] Craig Dalton: So yeah, I'm really excited for this discussion and I'm super stoked that this is on the day of the big launch. So if you're listening on August 10th, which is when this podcast is first released, SRAM has got some things to talk about today. But before we get into that, I always like to get a little bit of information about you as a rider where you're living and how'd you get into the sport.

[00:01:22 ] Chris Mandell: Yeah. Thanks for that. I've been a passionate cyclist for a really long time, my dad did a bit of road racing back in the day and we always had bikes around. Yeah. But I got distracted with American football in high school, and then ended up going to college to play American football and found really quickly in college that I did not want to keep playing at that level.

[00:01:44 ] And so I stopped that and was really lucky in that the town that I lived in McMinnville, Oregon had a small but strong mountain bike scene. And the people there took me under their wing and I started mountain biking with them. And then eventually started working at the local bike shop Tony's and just fully embraced it and was obsessed with it.

[00:02:02 ] And then after I graduated from college, I got a job working full speed ahead, which took me up to Seattle which was great. Cause there was ton of really good cross country riding outside of Seattle, but there was also. A lot of like free side and downhill riding. So at that point I branched and was, writing a commuter to, and from work riding and racing cross country, race bikes, and then also going up to the Whistler bike park and riding that as much as possible kind of fast-forward became a product manager at Kona bikes and developed full suspension bikes at cone bikes for a long time.

[00:02:38 ] And then eventually made the jump to become the rear shock product manager at RockShox. Which had me moved from Bellingham where I was working for Kona, Bellingham, Washington to Colorado Springs, Colorado, and had a great four and a half years living in Colorado Springs, Colorado being really detailed, focused on full suspension, mountain bikes and what it takes to.

[00:03:02 ] Tune shocks and developed shocks for OEM customers like specialized or Santa Cruz. And then at a certain point, unfortunately, due to some family reasons my wife and I needed to move back to Bellingham to be closer to her family. And so we, when we made that shift I switched over from working in product development, to working on the PR side of things, which is what has me on the phone with you.

[00:03:25 ] But in this, in a similar timeframe, we also, I, had a child and I was getting a little bit older and I'd always like commuted and like dabbled in, in rode bikes a little bit, but I'd never really rode bikes. Never really grabbed a hold of me, but gravel bikes started to grab a hold of me.

[00:03:42 ] And it was about that time about when I had, when we had our child that I got a gravel bike and really started riding one pretty consistently. Fell in love with a lot of what, the early days of cross country riding, where for me, which was exploring your local area and like finding the different nooks and crannies and gravel roads and going to the places that you hadn't been to before.

[00:04:07 ] But also really being able to like physically push myself, on, on a mountain bike on one hour mountain bike ride, you go up and then you come down, but on a one-hour gravel ride, you're basically peddling your brains off the entire time. So like the fitness side of that was really helpful for me.

[00:04:22 ] In addition to connecting with the original spirit of what caught me in the cross country, mountain biking back in the day. So yeah, and so now living in Bellingham and I started that gravel journey in Colorado. Which is a really excellent place for gravel riding, but now living in Bellingham, Washington, which we're obviously very well known for our mountain bike trails and the mountain bike trail network is super expansive between, Galbreath mountain, which is the hill with a lot of mountain bike specific built trails, right in town.

[00:04:52 ] And then the Chuck nuts, which is a little bit south of town, which is more hiking trails with some bikes specific trails, but a much bigger, longer area. But there's actually quite a bit of graveling to do here. This area I'm actually mountain bike got started here in, in logging terrain.

[00:05:07 ] It's all working for us in this part of the country. And in order to have a working forest you have to have fire roads. And so there's just fireworks roads running in every possible direction. And then a lot of those thyroids have single track connections to them. So you can really get out and go quite far on your gravel bike from your door and have some pretty, pretty amazing adventures and get to be able to see some pretty big mountains.

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