Gunn-Rita Dahle Flesjå, Hannes Genze, José Antonio Hermida, Rudi van Houts, Jochen Kaess, Andreas Kugler and Ralph Naef – no other elite pro MTB team comes back from the planet’s race courses with more success and experience than the MULTIVAN MERIDA BIKING TEAM. Olympic Gold and Silver, World, Europe and National Championship triumphs, Overall World Cup victory… this team has already achieved everything that pro riders around the globe are working hard for during every season. But to MERIDA, these top-class athletes mean much more than permanent guarantors for constant successes: They are the best and most reliable source for valuable feedback with respect to the development of new bikes.

As soon as the R&D engineers of MERIDA’s German development centre have finished their first working stage, the new model stands by as welded aluminium prototype. This pretest bike is equipped with current season’s components and is still far away from the later serial version. At this point, weight or visual appearance still don’t matter – these aspects are discussed later. Instead, the MULTIVAN MERIDA BIKING TEAM pro riders and Juergen Falke as MERIDA’s Head of Design directly go about nothing else than a very first practical test of the new development’s geometry and chassis kinematics. In doing so, the sensible “backside meters” of Ralph Naef and colleagues detect even the smallest evolution options which are logged immediately in detail. Seat angle too steep or steer angle to shallow?

Could the chain stays be longer for more riding stability – or should the bike be more agile? Does the calculated top tube length correspond correctly to the seating position required by the respective range of application? How sensitive and propulsion-neutral is the chassis? With the background of countless training and racing kilometres, no prototype in the world is able to deceive the pro riders of our MULTIVAN MERIDA BIKING TEAM – mostly to the delight of our developers and always for the benefit of all MERIDA customers.

Back in MERIDA’s German R&D headquarters, the qualified input is processed meticulously before the next run on the test track – and then again until all participants at this stage of development award the pretest bike with top grades. Then the engineers take a back seat to our designers. According to strict specifications in terms of target weight, referential stiffness or particular manufacturing requirements, the raw aluminium prototype is transformed into a perfectly styled bike – eagerly waiting to be produced in MERIDA’s Taiwanese company headquarters.