Weekend Warriors

The good people responsible for designing, engineering, marketing and selling Felt products know one thing for certain: You can only accomplish so much from the confines of the cubicle. Because we’re a fairly small crew, there’s never a shortage of work that needs to get done, but staying connected to cycling—the activity that brought us together in the first place—is just as important as making a dent in that teetering mountain of paperwork.

Riding breeds inspiration. It creates some questions and answers others. It spurs on dialogue about making better products. It doesn’t really matter if it’s a cruiser ride to the café or a lunchtime hammerfest—riding bikes generates ideas.

Competitive riding can be especially instructive for guiding product development. Before any performance product from Felt hits the market, it has been tested and retested not only by our sponsored pro athletes, but also by engineers, product managers and other Felt cubicle dwellers who morph into weekend warriors just like so many of the people who buy our bikes.

Case in point: Two weekends ago three of the Felt fast guys competed at the District Track Championships in San Diego. Marketing staffers Pete Coulson and Jake Duehring, along with Road Brand Manager Dave Koesel, traveled south to San Diego to compete against other top track athletes in the Southern California and Nevada regions. They came home with a nice collection of titles.

Jake crushed it in several events and won both the individual pursuit and the kilo championships. He also won the team sprint but was ineligible for the title because one of his teammates wasn’t a resident.

The Felt crew scored several other podium finishes during the weekend, too. Dave and Jake powered their team pursuit squad to second, even though they had only three riders (instead of the usual four). And Dave just missed out on winning the scratch race, finishing second, with Pete right behind him in third. In the Madison, Pete and Dave were on their way to winning until Pete flatted late in the race. The duo still managed to finish third.

It was clearly a successful weekend, and just one example of the cycling passion that exists within the walls of the Felt USA headquarters. It’s the experiences of riders like Jake, Dave and Pete that help make Felt products better.

Unfortunately our usual Tour de France-quality pro photographers were busy shooting the ,um, Tour de France that weekend, but we did get a couple of snapshots from San Diego.

Here’s one of Jake taking gold on the podium…



And another of Dave K leading the team pursuit squad to second place.