Pro bike check: Peaty’s Santa Cruz V10 Spitfire in detail
You've seen the paintwork, here's how he had it set up
Here’s a close up talk-through from Steve Peat of how he had his iconic ‘Spitfire bike’ set up for his last ever race before his retirement.
>>> Are these the 12 coolest paintjobs of all time?
You’ve probably seen pics of the bike before but this video goes beyond the paintjob and offers a rather fascinating insight into how The Big Man had his bike setup for the Andorra race track that was to be his swansong race.
Having said that, the video does highlight a few things about the special paintjob that we didn’t notice first time around: the coil spring is camo painted, so to are the collars of Peaty’s signature Lizard Skins lock-on grips, and we never noticed the RAF roundel on the face plate of the stem. Nice!
Anyway, back to bike setup…
In the video Peaty explains why he runs mismatched brakes (XTR on the front and Saint on the rear). The reason is that Saint brakes don’t suit his style of braking on the front. Peaty brakes late and quite heavily and Saint brakes feel too grabby for him, so he “de-tunes” the brake power/feel by running a Shimano XTR brake up front.
He also explains why he runs an XXL sized frame but then runs a special Chris King Buzzworks headset that reduces the reach by 8mm. Why? Because he runs a V10 with a custom 10mm-longer rear linkage and so the -8mm headset puts him back in the ‘standard’ place within the frame.
The light-hearted and refreshingly roughly-shot video is packed with other little tech titbits: he ran Maxxis Shorty tyres, 203mm rotors front and rear, 82 and 88 psi in his Fox 40 forks.. and his V10 even has an integrated gun rack. No really.
The filmmakers 50to1 say: “Have a fun run through Steve’s special v10 – We must state the equipment used are all fake replicas created as props for film use only. a bit of light hearted themed fun. please enjoy :)”