Ola, to all the BikeTrials fans from the US and across the World from all of us at Team BRISA in Spain!!!

It has been a great trip so far and tomorrow is the first BIG day; (we ride with the worlds best). The boys - Shaun Miller, JJ. Gregorowicz and Mike along with Stevie Morgan, our new BIU delegate, arrived on Wednesday. I flew in from Brazil to the US and out the same day with our NEW prototype disk BRISA arriving in Spain on Thursday, the following day.

We are in a town called Sant Fruitos in Spain. It's more like a country side town, one hour from Barcelona. The people here are very friendly. Since I speak Spanish, we are having no problemas whatsoever… I find myself translating for the British and others quite a lot. They all think, what kind of American is this? He looks and speaks Spanish? That is because I am half Spanish - born in the USA and raised in Brazil and in California around many Mexicans. I learned Portuguese and Spanish - they are somewhat similar. Once we get to France, no more language benefits for us.

I am now typing from the office of the camping establishment we are staying at.
I am having a beer and eating a salad with a sandwich they call butifarra which is sausage on a bun. They seem to like butifarra quite a lot because you can find it everywhere. On Friday night we hit town to see what was happening and watched a cultural street performance on stage of many types of local issues. They boys thought it was boring because they didn't understand a thing, well neither did I, because they were speaking a different old traditional type of Spanish called Cataluya. I don't know if many of you are into history, but I dig it, especially when it has to do with my background.

Well, enough of the entire history lesson!

Stevie Morgan, our BIU delegate is trying to have JJ. ride Master instead of Expert. JJ. qualified to ride Master in 1999 and because he did not compete last year they dropped him back to Expert. Shaun will ride Expert, he has just finished building the Brisa B20 DISK that we brought along just to show it off and play around with it. I went out to take some pictures and everyone stopped us along the way. What I noticed was that we were in Mod land. Everyone tripped out at how the bike rode and how INSANE it looked! We still have to test it carefully of course!

Since Shaun Miller did not have a great first round and will most likely not ride Japan, he will ride the remaining part of the Worlds to promote our New B20 Disk and test it, for the good of the Company. What a Team Mate!!!

We have redesigned the drop outs of the B20 to allow a shorter wheel base and a built in chain tensioner. The B26 Disk is so awesome, that JJ. and Shaun decided to compete with them, even though they just received them! The plan was to have our fork and use the same 145 mm rotors on the front, but we didn't have time to make the forks and just bought Monty forks at their factory. The Monty forks work well with the 160 mm disks, but definitely changes the geometry and feel of our bikes, making it much slower in performance. We like the fast easy up short wheel base and feel of our straight forks. Soon we will have a prototype disk fork for both bikes. We will most likely use 160 rotors on the frames and forks to keep it simple, and because the Magura rotors did perform better than Hope's 145 mm. The finish of the rotors was really the factor in performance.

To all of you interested in our New Brisa Disk Bikes. They most likely won't be available until the end of the year. It looks as though we have made them so strong and tight fitting that we shouldn't have any problems. The B26 Disk comes with the option of mounting a Magura Luise caliper inside like the B20, as well as any caliper to the top of the drop out. We feel both ways will hold up extremely well, but we prefer to use caliper inside the frame - it just seems more solid.

We also have an 8 mm drilled out chain stay reinforcement to protect the stays from too much damage caused by hitting obstacles. The NEW ELITE handlebar that the riders are testing will be available in about 45 days. It is made from 7075 aerospace aluminum (triple butted) SUPER strong and weighs 100 grams less than our current model.
It also is tricked out with laser etching, bead blasting as well as anodized black.

On behalf of all our Dealers, especially Armstrong Bike Dock in the UK, we would like to apologize to all our customers about the delay in delivering our products to you. We have encountered some manufacturing difficulties and also did not expect to sell as fast as we have, especially to the UK. We have not been just sitting around, that I can assure all of you! We are working very hard to improve our products, keep up with demand, as well as build our sport, but it's not always easy, especially in the beginning.

Biketrials.com will soon have what I was able to film from Spain of the BIU World Championships, and some down town Barcelona riding. So keep your eyes out for our American boys and cheer them on….

Here's some more pictures for you guys...