My sniveling plea for a Banshee Prototype (they were looking for test pilots)

- originally posted on Banshee's blog last spring...

westwoodsCT said...

Friends, I am the epitemy of the mountain bike nation. A nation of dreamers and wannabes that will blow off work, family picnics, anniversaries, etc. to unwittingly trash expensive, finely-crafed bikes to the detrement of our children's college savings.

We accomplish this through extreme mis-calculation, stupidity, attention-deficit, clumbsiness, and dumb brute force. Then caringly apply touch-up paint to the gouges and scrapes in the rotting carcass (and the bike).

Guys who ride like the vids on the top of this page don't break stuff as much as guys like me, who can't hardly do any of that stuff. The guys at the top of the page should be given frames because of their gift + the way they make your bikes look...

...But if your purpose is to put your hardware to the test for real, with people who aren't gifted in any way... but share the passion enough to lie, cheat and steal for parts money, then send your frame to me.

Although, in our collective head, my people think we're that guy at the top of this page, the truth is that we are a big majority of your warranty nightmares. If you're good enough to ride like the kid at page top, people give you bikes, and you have the skills to make bike breakage a rare occurance...

But if you are like the rest of us, you'll need to spend a good part of your life working to afford bikes that you can only ride on weekends cause you work. I cannot guarantee I'll wreck the test bike, my current Banshee doesn't seem phazed so far... But I haven't barely broken it in yet. By this time with my last two bikes, I was on my second warranty frame.

If blessed, I will bring it to the place I have spent the past 20 years grinding down trails with bikes... once plush pine forest...
...now the rockiest, deadest, most blighted & eroded, eco-thermally baked, patch that sububia didn't want, ex-quarry and baby-head single-track cliff rock in CT... aka Westwoods. It is here that I would send this frame of yours, until it wets itself, boxes itself up and runs crying back to the plush mossy and moosey north woods, or I will die trying.

Banshee, help me help you make a better rig. Send me a frame.
I love my current Chapparel and am only requesting this for devotion to making your brand better.

(ok, so i don't have a video)