I’ve ridden a lot of XC bikes over the years. My introduction to cycling was through our Lycra-clad, skinny mountain biker friends. I grew up racing NICA all spring and dusty cyclocross races throughout the winter, then spent a few years chasing UCI points and attempting to qualify for a World Cup.

Eventually, I stepped away from the endurance world trading my lycra for baggies. I was much more interested in throwing myself down a mountain and seeing how quickly I could get to the bottom, or how much dirt I could throw over the top of each berm. Soon, I found myself getting sucked back into going full gas up fire roads.

The difference this time around was that XC bikes had finally started getting fun. They weren’t just nervous little race machines anymore. Modern cross-country bikes were becoming legitimately capable downhill, but I still felt like my dream bike was missing. I wanted something that pedaled hard and climbed like a nippy race bike, but when I turned around, I wanted it to ride more like the mid-travel trail bikes I’d grown to love during my time away from XC.

That all changed when I first laid eyes on the Revel Ranger V3. I’ve had my Ranger for about six months now, and I can confidently say this is the bike I’d been dreaming up for years. The CBF suspension gives it an incredibly efficient feel under power without sacrificing how active and composed the bike feels when things get rough.

Since getting it, I’ve gone through a few different suspension setups and more wheel-and-tire combinations than I care to admit. Eventually, all that tinkering led me to what I think is the ultimate Downieville Classic setup: a bike built to hammer the hour-long climb without making me regret every life decision once I point it down the backside.

The first decision when building my Ranger was frame size. At 6’1” with long legs, I generally land on a Large, and the Ranger was no different. The Ranger follows the current trend of longer reaches and steeper seat tube angles, which lets me run a 50mm Trail One Rockville Stem and still have an aggressive but comfortable riding position.

I’d say I’m toward the upper end of the Large size range. I have a good amount of my 180mm OneUp Dropper Post sticking out of the frame, and if I wanted the traditional stretched-out, long-and-low XC race position, I’d probably need to put an ugly long stem on it. No thanks. Having spent most of my life bouncing between a Large and XL, I’m happy to see shorter-travel bikes finally getting geometry that lets you actually ride the piss out of them.

One of my favorite things about the Ranger, and really all Revels, is the CBF suspension platform. It’s hard to argue against a flex-stay XC bike if your only goal is building the absolute lightest bike possible. But if you want your short-travel bike to actually ride well, CBF is hard to beat.

There’s almost no noticeable bobbing while climbing, yet the rear wheel actually tracks the ground instead of skipping across it. Yes, you give up a little weight compared with the lightest XC frames, but in my mind that’s a small price to pay for suspension that genuinely works. Within my first few rides, I had basically stopped touching the lockout. I’ll occasionally use it, but most of the time I prefer leaving the suspension active and letting CBF do its thing on fire-road climbs.

Then you point the Ranger downhill and this thing absolutely eats for having only 120mm of rear travel. I’m repeatedly surprised with how composed it stays when I’m pushing hard. The suspension feels active and smooth off the top, tracks well through chatter, and gives enough mid-stroke and end-stroke support that I can keep leaning on the bike as speeds pick up.

Another Ranger detail I appreciate has nothing to do with ride quality: it’s actually pleasant to work on. As a full-time mechanic at Worldwide Cyclery, the last thing I want to do after spending all day working on bikes is go home and spend hours faffing around with my own.

That’s a lie. I love tinkering.

Still, the Ranger makes life easy. The links and pivots are straightforward, the hardware fits together nicely, and there aren’t a bunch of tiny greasy alignment washers waiting to launch themselves underneath your workbench. Revel even changed the rear axle from a 5mm to a 6mm hex, matching what you’ll find on most Fox and RockShox front axles. It’s the smallest detail imaginable, but being able to use the same tool for both wheels is exactly the sort of thing I appreciate.

Oh boy, here we go. If there’s one thing I spent more time debating than anything else on this bike, it was the wheel-and-tire setup. I’d argue there is almost nothing that affects your Downieville Classic experience more than tires. Other than fitness, I guess.

Show up with something chunky and aggressive and you’ll love life on the high-speed descents, but you’ll be dragging a bunch of extra rubber up the climb and through the slower singletrack. Go too light and fast and you might fly up the mountain, only to spend the descent standing on the side of the trail frantically jamming plugs into your tire while everyone rides past.

This was my seventh Downieville, so I’ve had a few opportunities to get this wrong. A scouting trip about a month before the race helped solidify my final choice. Liam and I also made an entire video dissecting the different setups we tested, so I won’t force you through every single combination again here.

For race day, I settled on a WTB Peacekeeper 120 TPI up front with a WTB Ranger 60 TPI in the rear. For me, this was about as light and fast as I felt comfortable going while still allowing myself to ride semi-aggressively on the descent. The thicker 60 TPI Ranger in the rear gave me a little more insurance where I’m most likely to cause problems.

I also ran a set of discontinued superlight Tubolight inserts front and rear. Normally, I only run an insert in the back, but during a preride about a month before the race, I managed to smoke my rim and pinch my front tire, which was enough evidence for me.

Downieville is filled with rocks and obstacles that are pretty easy to avoid when you’re fresh, alert and riding comfortably. When you’re cross-eyed, exhausted and trying to go downhill as fast as possible, those same rocks suddenly become a lot harder to miss. Accidents happen. For a little extra insurance, I put an insert in the front too.

The wheel decision was slightly less stressful, although getting something light enough to race while still strong enough to survive Downieville presents its own problem. Gulo Composites, a small North Carolina company specializing in carbon-spoke wheels, reached out to us about its GMT 30 trail wheelset. They weigh right around 1,200 grams. Naturally, I was fascinated.

I was also a little nervous about racing carbon spokes at something as aggressive as Downieville. We’ve all seen the photos of spectacularly exploded carbon-spoke wheels. But Chad at Gulo showed me some of their testing, where their proprietary spokes survived more than 20 stress-test cycles while some other carbon and steel-bladed spokes failed almost immediately. More importantly, I couldn’t break the wheels while thrashing them around my home trails, so onto the race bike they went.

And they survived. The GMT 30s look awesome, ride even better, and they’ll 100% be returning to this bike next year. I’m also excited to see just how much of a beatdown I can give them this winter.

Unlike most of the rest of my mountain bike fleet, I went electronic on the Ranger with SRAM XX SL Transmission. Transmission has become so normal at this point that it’s increasingly difficult for me to look at anything else without feeling like I’m stepping backward.

I’m running essentially the complete XX SL group with the 10-52T cassette paired to a big-dog 36-tooth chainring and Quarq power meter. I thought I was pretty cool showing up with a 36t. Then our good friend and 2025 Downieville winner Carter Nieuwesteeg showed up with a 38-tooth. Needless to say, I immediately felt slow.

Liam and I were also fortunate enough to get our race bikes outfitted with CeramicSpeed finishing kits this year. I had a CeramicSpeed BB ALPHA keeping the cranks spinning and an OSPW X bolted onto the XX SL derailleur.

Some people will tell you that chasing a couple watts of drivetrain efficiency is completely negligible at a rugged mountain bike race like Downieville. Those people are probably right. But marginal gains aside, there is something extremely satisfying about spinning your cranks and watching those giant pulley wheels keep going. Do I even need to explain how much faster the bike looks with them? Exactly.

Flashy paint and a bougie drivetrains are great, but what really makes a bike feel like your bike are the little details that most people probably never notice. Those are my favorite parts of a build.

The most visible one on the Ranger is my Friend and Fiend On-Tube Bag, mounted to the accessory mounts inside the front triangle. This awesome little bag stays on the bike full-time and carries most of my larger flat-repair supplies.

I almost always have some kind of ride wallet or tool roll in my back pocket with plugs, CO2 and basic tools, so the Friend and Fiend bag carries a WTB NanoAir TPU tube, extra CO2 cartridges, tire boots, duct tape, zip ties and spare valve cores. Basically enough junk to deal with a pretty catastrophic tire failure. For race day, I considered slimming the flat kit down to save some weight. Then I remembered it was Downieville and decided to just run the whole thing.

Another detail almost nobody would notice is hiding underneath both brake levers: SRAM Blips. During The Great Descent, a gnarly local backcountry XC race, I had an absolutely savage faceplant in the closing hour and broke my shifter pod. That left me grinding through the final four miles in my 36x10, desperately hoping I could hold off the rider behind me.

After that experience, I wanted a backup plan for Downieville, so I stuck a Blip underneath each brake lever. If I smash my main controller into a tree or the ground, I still have a way to shift. I used to think Blips on a mountain bike were pretty silly. Now they’ve quickly become a staple on my electronic bikes. They’re great insurance, and I’ll admit it’s also pretty nice being able to grab another gear while tucked up trying to be “aero.”

Another race-specific detail is the computer mount on top of the stem. With my XC background, I’ve done more than my fair share of staring at numbers while riding. At home, unless I’m doing intervals, I rarely use a GPS computer anymore. I much prefer recording rides on my Garmin Instinct 3 and keeping the handlebars clean.

For a race like Downieville, though, the computer comes back. The main climb is long and consistent enough that pacing matters, so I ran a Garmin Edge MTB where I could easily keep an eye on my effort and avoid doing something stupid in the first 20 minutes.

Finishing off the little details are a King Cage titanium bottle cage, Trail One Components seat collar and Trail One tubeless valves. Do any of those make the bike dramatically faster? Probably not. Do they make the build feel complete? Absolutely.

So, this was my 2026 Downieville Classic race bike, and it was basically flawless. I managed to pilot it to seventh overall, finishing 13th on XC day and fifth in the downhill. More importantly, I came away from the weekend without a list of things I desperately wanted to change. That almost never happens.

The Ranger really is my dream version of a downcountry bike. You can build one lean and mean like this and go chase race results, or throw on heavier tires and burlier components and turn it into a ridiculously fun short-travel trail bike. What keeps impressing me is how little compromise there seems to be between those two personalities.

When I’m pedaling, the bike feels extremely efficient. There is practically no noticeable suspension bob, and it feels like every watt I put into the pedals goes toward moving the bike forward. Then I turn around and point it downhill, and it doesn’t suddenly remind me that I’m sitting on a 120mm XC bike. It feels like a little trail bike.

That’s what I wanted when I started this build, and after six months of riding, tinkering and eventually racing it at Downieville, that’s still what stands out most. There really isn’t much I’d change for next year.

Maybe a 38-tooth chainring.

You know, just so Carter doesn’t make me feel slow again.