Page 35 - Bespoke Issue

MISSION IMPOSSIBLE
Max Stöckl does the Kitzbühel Hahnenkamm Downhill Ski course on a Mountain Bike
There are some things that one would say are impossible, but Markus “Max” Stöckl believes there is no such thing as a “Mission Impossible”.
A few years ago, he set a downhill speed record for a production mountain bike, by cycling down the volcanic cone of Cerro Negro in Nicaragua at 164.95 kph, that was in 2011. So last year (2017) a now 42 year old Max, who also happens to be the general manager of the World Cup running MS- Racing Mondraker MTB Team thought he should go out and beat his own record.
So, Stöckl assembled a six-man support team and headed off to Chile’s Atacama Desert on the country’s Paci c Coast, a place which is the embodiment of “extreme” - nothing thrives there, just boulders dust and stones for miles and miles, but it does have a mountain slope. A mountain slope with a summit of 3,972m altitude, this is what Stöckl was going to ride down. The start of the downhill is 45 degree slope followed by a run off that makes the decent a total of 1200m top to bottom and just as luck would have it, the surroundings also made for ideal wind resistance, so it was game on.
Just to prove that he’s not entirely insane, Max wore a special suit with a built-in airbag, similar to those worn by downhill ski jumpers and racers. The materials also afford a higher degree of air ow as at this speed versus gravity, wind resistance is a major factor. His weapon of choice for the decent was a Mondraker downhill bike, with no modi cations at all, it was important to Max that the record was achieved on an “off the shelf” machine, all be it a very high end one... For those of you who aren’t into mountain biking this is like calling a Ferrari 488 Pista an “off the shelf” production car.
35