Dakotah Norton Explains Why He's Riding 75mm Bars

Dakotah's endgame:

Like Jason said, Dak has seen the light. He's the prophet of the Church of the tall Stack.

And as a 6ft+ dude who's always thought that the front end on his own bike wasn't tall enough, I for one welcome these experiments. Hopefully this will ruffle some feathers in the industry, once Dak inevitably wins a world cup on his new setup. Tall stack is going to be the new "long, low, slack".

BTW, I'd absolutely buy some "Stack Norton"-signature bars. Mondraker, make it happen!

I will buy 75s for both my bikes if the dak sig gets released

I have a short reach too. At 6’ my wife who is only 5’ 5’ has a longer reach then me…I would never get into a boxing ring with her.  Love that Dak is pushing boundaries here.   Looking forward to the innovation this brings.  Watching him on the bike the style is totally different… I think other guys might like a taller setup, especially those who feel more comfy on a moto. 

My first DH bike was a Heckler with a Z1 and 4" cruiser bars. Then I got a Super 8 to ride around and suddenly I had a spare bike. So when the 22" cracked, I called Willy in Warranty and got an orange 18" to match my Z1 and slapped an S&M stem and 7" GT bars on it. 26" full suspension BMX bike. It was so fun and confidence inspiring. Like being a kid again. Later I went longer and lower. 

Imagine if he went to that reverse raised or whatever it called stem too 😂

I wonder how much taller version 4 will be! Mondraker could just make a frame with a longer head tube and he wouldn't need such tall bars.

Any of you moto guys compared/measured bar height to peg distance and compared it to bar height to pedal distance?  

I think the most telling part of the video was the fact his actual bar height was he same as someone else on a GT...he's really just compensating for the strangely shirt stack on his mondraker. I feel his pain...my Knolly has an annoyingly short headtube.

dak just won semi-finals in poland!

Stoked for Dak!

Being a tall guy (190cm) I picked up some Deity Highline 80mm rise bars for my Bikepacking hardtail- for pure comforts- but turns out they rip on the bike when the bags are off! Love em.

Whether or not the tall bars are helping, they're clearly not hurting. Homie was on pace to win this weekend.

or lost traction in the front due to the high rise when crossing the lines in his race run ? just to fuel the fire.

I know he has explained why 75mm rise works for him, but I just think 50mm with an extra 1cm spacer and a riser stem would look so much better...

He explained why that didn't work for him though, as it increases the chances of his chin hitting during huge compressions. 

I think the debate is settled when he pointed out that his bar to ground measurement isn't very different than the GT frame. Its just that Mondraker have crazy short head-tubes. Mondraker were obviously one of the first to push the long reach super short stem short offset concept, they've just been left behind a bit as we realized that you also need more stack, and a 40-50mm stem to weight the front effectively. Then you get t-rex arms like Dak, and you need even more stack.

I bet with a high stack frame, Dak's setup wouldn't look weird at all. 

Dak they're not gonna break that easily. At least not the bolts (whichever ones). Give them hell. 

He crashed because he hit a slippery mud patch not because of his bar setup...

Great breakdown/comparison of Dak and Ronan by Elliot Jackson and Redbull Bike.

So the same set up that made him the last man down is wrong from a couple stills with some lines drawn on. Cool cool to be armchair qb

Elliot isn't saying one is wrong or right, just showing the viewers the difference.   Dakota runs a softer fork setup and stiffer rear because of his weight bias.  Ronan on the other hand is the opposite, stiffer fork and softer rear.

I also wouldn't consider Elliot an armchair QB, him and Rob Warner have great opinions and insights.  They have been there, and done that at the highest level.

I appreciate Elliot but the lines are sus unless Dak and Ronan have the same body measurements and the fact riders move so much on their bikes that they may never be in the exact same position in the same section run from run. He was a qb now he is an armchair qb

Love it!! I started this thread to ask the bicycle industry for something like those bars: https://www.vitalmtb.com/forums/The-Hub,2/Another-geo-thread-this-time-…

But what he's stating is a fact. It's simple trigonometry. If you move your hands higher, your weight moves backwards. 

Imagine infinitely tall bars where your arms are vertical above you, versus 0 rise bars, you can clearly imagine the gradient where lowering the bars creates the lean forward at the hip, thus moving the centre of gravity forward. 

He's not saying which is faster as that is relative to style and setup, but you can't dispute very basic geometry concepts, it's not armchair QB as you put it. 

I have to disagree. And you can easily prove it to yourself by standing on your feet and reaching your arms out in front of you. At full standing height, your hips are above your feet, and you are balanced. Now move toward a squat position. Your hips move back, your shoulders (and hands) move forwards, but you are still balanced over your feet. Balance point never changed, even though the hands moved down and forward, because you counterbalanced by moving your hips down and back.

I haven't listened to this particular podcast yet, but in a previous pod he mentioned that moving the bars up was more a reaction to having a longer bike. Higher bars brings them backwards due to the head angle, and allows him a more upright position, more similar to shorter guys like Jackson, where his hips don't have to be so far back to balance everything out.

Last, I take issue with the still frames Eliot is using. Just looking at the arms, Dak's arms are straighter in the photo than Ronan's. All this says to me is that Dak has moved his weight back from neutral at this moment (basically what splayleg said). I don't think it has anything to do with bar height. Maybe it does, but we would need more than 1 point in time to decide that.

I have a friend who is very much in tune with what is happening with his (and other people's) surroundings and how things work and sometimes gives very counter intuitive suggestions that turn out true. Case in point, skiing. If you are sqauting over the tails of the skis and want to load the tips, what do you do? Raise the heels or the toes? 

What is the logical solution? Then, try it out, step on a flip flop or two (since it's summer in Northern hemisphere) with either your heels or your toes and compare which option gives you more confidence to load the toes more.

That's what's the catch, confidence. For me raising the bars removed the plank position issue that @TEAMROBOT mentioned somewhere. I've also noticed that having the bars closer (shorter effective reach) also moves me more forwards that the other way around as I'm not scared as much. Being scared automatically means you pull back into a defensive position. 

This analogy works because you CANNOT weight your hands at all, therefore you have to stay balanced over your midfoot, otherwise you fall over.  But unfortunately it isn't a correct system to explain a bike. 

Having the bars lower enables you to weight your hands MORE, than having taller bars. Again, imagine really really tall bars, not only will they be closer to you, but because they are higher you can't weight them as much. 

Your 2nd paragraph I 100% agree with, he is moving the bars higher (any further away from the front) because of the long reach, to maintain a better position for his proportions. 

@Primoz I totally agree on the confidence aspect being incredibly important and should be a very valid consideration in setup. 

But therein lies the catch, putting weight in the hands is not necessarily a good thing. I have improved my riding on two separate bikes by taking the weight away. Because by removing weight I could choose when and how to weigh the bars instead of being forced to do it and not being able to get away from it.

It takes a lot of confidence to be able to ride like that. Which I don't have. 

A dramatic oversimplification really and armchair analysis at its best. The whole "center of gravity" talk based around still shots is honestly completely useless. Doesn't tell you anything about dynamic weight distribution or chassis stability. And it doesn't take any differences in geometry, setup or preferred riding position into account. I would honestly expect better from Elliot.

A few good points being made above. There seems to be a bit of disagreement out there as to how much weight to put on your hands. and not just by us mortals on forums. There are several pros who have described their riding style as "off-the-back", where some pros (I remember a specific mention of Brian Lopes) have a very forward hand-heavy riding style. And both work for different people.

In general, most coaches seem to agree that you want your weight over the BB, with little to no weight on your hands. This is the neutral position though, and you need to be able to move your weight forward/backward with the terrain. There is certainly a point to be made that higher bars make it harder to weight the front when needed, and these guys certainly have times when they have all their weight on the hands. And it is probably true that Dak needed more weight on his hands when his front wheel washed out. I'm just not convinced that handlebar height was the main culprit here. He won semis on this setup, so it must work for him. If he has made a compromise where he lost some ability to get weight on the front but gained somewhere else, he probably understands the tradeoff. And in this specific instance, as shown in the pictures, I think it's more that Dak made a small error in not anticipating the extra front wheel grip he would need, and didn't move forward (as opposed to not being able to move forward), and it had high consequences.