The NS Bikes DH team has recently entered the scene with freshly signed Polish young gun Hubert Posmyk and an ex-national champion and current NS full suspension product developer Maciek Kucbora on board. These two guys are the part of the R&D department that is currently in the final stage of the development of the first ever NS downhill bike that should be ready to enter the market in spring 2014.

The prototypes have been around for some time now. Testing started during the deep winter on the wet slopes of San Remo and now consecutive prototypes are being used in competition by Hubert and Maciek. The frame kinematics are based on one of the best solutions available - a 4-bar linkage system with a Horst link. However there is a twist to this - a floating shock. This solution places the heavy spring very close to the bb, allowing for a very lower center of gravity and gets the shock out of the way optically. The frame has modern angles - it's low, slack and has an adjustable chainstay length, with a very short position available.

The look of the frame will be kept as clean as possible, free from mangled hydroformed tubes. One of the goals of the design team is to make sure this frame is in line with the NS design philosophy and that means that it has to be tough and reliable.

So far the prototypes have been performing simply great - the bikes are well balanced, the suspension curves are perfect, so it looks like there will be another great bike out there. The team is now working on polishing up some design details and the final pre-production prototypes will be shown at Eurobike, and the frames and complete bikes in two price levels should be available on the market in March 2014.

Until this happens, the NS DH Team will continue ripping the local trails and major DH events on the prototype frames to deliver as much feedback as possible about the new design to the designers.

The DH Team members also take part in testing other NS products in the full suspension and racing category testing products like the Decade or the new direct mount stem.

A nice surprise from last week was Maciek's victory in a downtown race in Poland on the Soda Air. He just loves the way this bike performs in conditions when there is a lot of pedaling, fast jumps and tight corners. The Soda continues to prove that it is one of the most versatile bike out there.

Keep an eye on www.nsbikes.com for more updates on the NS DH prototype from our Team as testing continues.