Three venues. Three wins. Nobody had done that before Friday. Asa Vermette dropped in sixth of 23 riders at the first-ever Red Bull Hardline British Columbia at Cypress Mountain on October 16, 2026, and put down a 3m 30.061s that nobody beat — making him the first rider in the event’s history to win at Wales, Tasmania, and now BC. We’ve covered what Vermette did this season ending America’s nine-year DH World Cup drought and winning Whistler’s first-ever World Cup. This one’s about what he did it on.

Pinkbike’s bike check from Cypress pulled apart the setup in enough detail to actually explain something: a pivot position change that contradicts what Vermette’s been racing all season, suspension numbers that look almost too simple for a bike going off 75-foot gaps, and a brake rotor prototype that TRP apparently handed him with basically no notice. None of it is flashy. That’s sort of the point.

Quick Take

Winner	Asa Vermette (USA), 3m 30.061s — first rider to win at all three Hardline venues
Podium	Lachlan Stevens-McNab (NZL) 2nd, Oli Clark (GBR) 3rd
Women’s winner	Gracey Hemstreet (CAN), home soil, her third venue attempt, second venue won
Bike	Frameworks DH, bonded prototype chassis
Pivot position	Lowest of three available settings — a change from the middle position he raced his last two World Cups
Fork	Fox 40, 94 psi front
Tires	Continental, 24 psi front / 29–30 psi rear
Wheels	ENVE, carbon
Brakes	Prototype TRP, rotors with a deeper braking surface
Best for	Anyone who wants the setup reasoning, not just the spec sheet
Skip if	You want a trail-by-trail breakdown of the Cypress course — this is a components story

The Pivot Position Is the Real Story

Here’s the detail that actually matters more than any single number on this bike: Vermette’s Frameworks DH is a bonded prototype with three possible main-pivot positions, and he raced BC in the lowest one — not the middle setting he’d run at his last two World Cup rounds.

That’s not a small tweak. Main pivot position on a high-pivot-adjacent DH chassis changes anti-squat, how the suspension reacts under braking, and where the bike sits in its travel on repeated square-edge hits. Going from middle to lowest isn’t the kind of change a team makes for fun mid-season. It’s the kind of change a team makes when the track in front of them demands something different than the last nine months of World Cup circuits did.

Cypress Mountain isn’t a World Cup track. Hardline courses are built around consequence-first features — gaps you either commit to or don’t, not lines you can feather through at 80%. A lower pivot position typically trades a bit of mid-stroke support for a more settled, predictable feel deeper in the travel, which is exactly what you’d want when the bike’s about to take a harder hit than anything a World Cup downhill track throws at it. Frameworks and Vermette didn’t guess at this. They had three positions built into the bonded prototype specifically so they could make this call track by track, and BC is the track where they picked the setting furthest from what’s been winning World Cups all year.

The Three Pivot Positions, Side by Side

Frameworks built its bonded DH prototype with three selectable main-pivot positions, each changing the bike’s suspension kinematics without requiring a different frame.

Setting	When Raced	Suspension Effect
Lowest	Hardline BC, Oct 16, 2026	Settles deeper in travel; more predictable through sustained, high-consequence hits
Middle	His last two World Cup rounds, including Whistler	Balances pedaling sections against technical descending
Highest	Not raced at BC	Same adjustable system, likely suited to tracks where pedaling efficiency outweighs square-edge absorption

Three settings, one frame — and BC is the only round all season where the team didn’t run the middle one.

Fox and Continental: The Numbers That Don’t Look Dramatic

94 psi in the front of the Fox 40. On its own, that number tells you almost nothing — air pressure depends on rider weight, personal preference, and how a given fork’s internals respond to pressure versus tokens. What it does tell you is that Vermette isn’t running some wildly soft, bottomless setup to survive a brutal track. He’s running a number that, if you handed it to most Fox 40 owners without context, wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. The sophistication at Hardline-level racing isn’t usually in exotic pressures. It’s in getting a mainstream setup dialed precisely enough that it doesn’t need to be exotic.

Tire pressure tells a more pointed story. 24 psi front, 29–30 psi rear on Continental rubber is a real spread between the two ends, and it’s not an accident. The front tire needs to stay compliant enough to find grip and absorb square-edge hits at a pressure that would be too soft for a rear tire doing the same job while also transmitting power and surviving pinch-flat risk on landings. Running the rear nearly 6 psi higher than the front is the kind of split that shows up when a team has actually flatted or pinched something in testing and adjusted, not when someone picked round numbers off a chart. We’ve written before about Continental’s Kryptotal and SuperSoft compound lineup and how the brand’s gravity-casing options have matured — a bike getting raced and won on Hardline’s biggest stage is as real-world a validation as that lineup is going to get.

ENVE Wheels: The Part Nobody’s Arguing About

ENVE’s carbon wheels aren’t the headline here, and that’s sort of the compliment. At the level Vermette’s racing, wheel choice has mostly stopped being a question of “will this survive” and started being a question of “how does this feel.” ENVE’s downhill-specific carbon has been through enough World Cup and Hardline seasons at this point that nobody’s treating it as the experimental part of this build. It’s the part of the setup doing exactly what it’s supposed to do, which is the entire job description for a wheel.

The TRP Brakes Are Where This Gets Interesting

Prototype TRP brakes with rotors that have a deeper braking surface — more material, more surface area to shed heat into. That’s the kind of detail that sounds minor until you think about what a Hardline run actually does to a brake system: sustained, hard braking into gaps and over technical rock with almost no recovery sections to let rotors cool. Heat is the enemy of consistent brake feel, and a deeper braking surface is a direct answer to that problem, not a cosmetic one.

We’ve liked TRP’s EVO Pro in our own brake testing specifically for how consistently it holds bite point across temperature swings — that’s the production brake’s whole reputation. Handing Vermette a prototype rotor with more material to manage heat reads like TRP taking the exact problem the EVO Pro already solves reasonably well and pushing further at it for a discipline that punishes brakes harder than anything else in gravity racing. Whether that rotor design reaches the production EVO Pro lineup is a different question, and neither TRP nor Frameworks has said it will. For now, it’s race-only hardware that happened to win the biggest weekend of the season.

One Setup for One Weekend, Not a Universal Upgrade

The lowest pivot position that won at Cypress isn’t the “better” setting in some absolute sense — it’s the setting that fit Cypress. Trading mid-stroke pedaling support for a settled, predictable feel deep in the travel is a bad trade on a track with sustained pedaling sections, which is exactly why Vermette ran the middle position at Whistler and everywhere else this World Cup season. Our review of Frameworks’ production DH frame covers the bike you can actually buy, and it doesn’t ship with this bonded prototype’s three selectable positions — so the lesson from BC isn’t “run it low,” it’s “match the setting to what the track in front of you actually demands.”

That distinction is the real story. Three venues, three wins, on a bike tuned differently for each one instead of showing up with whatever won the last race. That’s a more useful takeaway than “he won” on its own ever could be.

Who Should Care About This

Anyone who followed Vermette’s season. His World Cup overall title and Whistler win were about results. This is about the setup decisions behind the Hardline-specific result those posts didn’t cover.

Riders curious about pivot-adjustable DH chassis. Three positions on one frame is a real engineering choice, not a marketing line, and the fact that Vermette’s team actually used a different one for BC than for World Cups all season is proof it does something.

Anyone tracking where TRP’s brake development is headed. A deeper-surface rotor prototype on the brand’s biggest win of the year is worth watching for signs it reaches production.

Who Should Skip This

Readers wanting Cypress Mountain course footage or a line-by-line breakdown. This is a components and setup piece, not a trail guide.

Anyone shopping for a Frameworks DH today. The production frame doesn’t ship with three selectable pivot positions or prototype TRP rotors. What you’d actually buy is covered in our frame review, and it’s a different bike than what won at Cypress.

The Bottom Line

Asa Vermette didn’t win Hardline British Columbia on an exotic build full of one-off parts nobody else gets to run. He won it on a Fox 40 at a pressure that wouldn’t look out of place on a World Cup bike, Continental tires split by pressure the way most serious racers split theirs, ENVE wheels that have stopped being news because they just work, and two genuinely interesting changes: a pivot position swapped away from his season-long setting, and a prototype TRP rotor built specifically to survive heat Hardline generates that World Cup tracks mostly don’t. Three venues, three wins, and the setup behind the third one says the team adjusted for the track instead of trusting what already worked. That’s the part worth remembering the next time somebody treats a spec sheet as the whole story.

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Setup details and race results sourced from Pinkbike’s bike check of Vermette’s Frameworks DH at Red Bull Hardline British Columbia and Red Bull’s official Hardline British Columbia results. No test unit has been ridden by our team at time of publication.