It’s still pretty odd that he smashes the KoM (which presumably includes many of his own runs)

A lot of racers don’t use Strava much either.

Either that or I’m faster than our local EWS pro on some of the best descents round here.

“so if you have enough trail and jacking (by using a 58 deg head angle) – the instability caused by reversing the stem could (maybe) be offset (no pun intended)?”

Unlikely. When you hit a bump the contact patch moves from the bottom of the tyre to further forwards, so you can lose a lot of your trail. And trail does very little at low speed. So if you come into a steep rocky descent with a turn in it and have to rapidly slow down before the bend, you’ll have lots of destabilising inputs from turning in the rocks, a lot of weight going into the bars and very little help from the geometric trail.

If that weight pushing into the bars is neutral or adding stability you’ll be ok. If it’s destabilising the bike through negative stem length then it won’t be good.

I’ve noticed a big change in steering feel when swapping from 50 to 35mm stems (I went back within a few months). 50mm is so much calmer! But I am hypersensitive to bike set-up.

The last 20 minute or so of the pinkbike podcast is Yoann talking about the Donut. It’s a good listen, he’s a great character as well as an awesome rider. And he is a big fan of the crazy geometry.

@brant – thanks for the link up-thread. Not so much about how the thing rode, although it apparently “worked”.
https://www.btr-fabrications.com/blog/creating-a-monster/