Steve Chapman chats to the unassuming Pearces who have shaped UK downhill racing.
Words Steve Chapman Photography As Credited
If you look at the movers and shakers of UK mountain bike events, it’s a small, close-knit pool of people. If you then dial in the microscope a little further and look at those who have been putting on events since the beginning you’re probably left with a number you could count on one hand.
Dave and Lindsey Pearce have been there since the beginning, and from their workshop on a quiet lane in the wilds of south Shropshire just outside Ludlow, they have left their own indelible mark on UK mountain biking that countless riders, be they local or from further afield, owe a great deal to. The Pearce race series has been a jumping off point for many UK professional downhill riders – to name a few there’s been the Athertons, Tracy and Ed Moseley, Marc Beaumont, Neil Donoghue, Matt Walker, the list goes on…
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The unsung hero is a dying breed – in the world of social media and hype there’s more than a few people keen to announce their own greatness, but Dave and Lyndsey are old school, they work hard, they get the important stuff right and at the core of their events and their wider business they put the rider first. They’ve never had to shout about their events because, like all good things, word of mouth does the work for them. If you’ve raced downhill in the UK, you will have heard of the Pearce downhill series and if you’ve been lucky enough to get an entry, you’ll also know what I’m talking about.
Pearce Cycles began life as Pearce Engineering. Dave had previously worked as an agricultural mechanic for a local farmer before setting up on his own in 1991 in the very premises that Pearce Cycles now inhabits. After struggling to find parts and people to work on their kids’ bikes, Dave and Lyndsey decided to get in a few bikes to sell, initially ten British Eagles from Newtown in Powys. The business grew from there with the bicycle side of things slowly becoming the focus.
I live locally to Dave and Lindsey’s shop so we’d arranged for me to go and speak with them on a typically busy Friday morning. The phone’s ringing off the hook and as I arrive they are already leafing through their scrapbook of memories. We have a bit of a catch up before sitting down to have a chat. Being in the shop instantly makes me feel nostalgic; it’s a building I know well as I’d often visit as a kid to get an inner tube or some other small purchase. But to be honest, as a kid I just liked to go there and talk bikes. I suppose, like a lot of kids do, it just felt like I was with my people. It’s always been the hub of the local cycling scene and before the internet, it was the way you got to see what was new and what was going to be next on the list of things to drool over.
I pick things up with Dave and Lyndsey on how they got into running events.
How long had the bike shop been running before you got into racing?
Lyndsey: Not long; ’96 was when we did the first national and it just went from there really… that’s 25 years, wow, that’s gone in the blink of an eye. But, yeah, we’ve done national series, national champs, student champs, we’ve done loads.
We’ve grown through experience – we’ve ended up with a lot of our own kit, and because we’re self-contained we can pretty well take on an event and know we can get on and do it our own way; we haven’t got to rely on anybody turning up. Matthew (Dave and Lyndsey’s son) does the fantastic medics, Gary (Brain) is into timing, Dave with all the machinery – tractors, diggers, whacker plates, the lot! And he really, really enjoys doing the trails. That’s another part of the business, trail building and trail maintenance – we have a contract with the forestry to do the inspections and things, and we get on very well with them, don’t we? So that works well when you want to do your own events.
How important has that relationship with the Forestry Commission been?
Dave: Very important. It’s a real good relationship we’ve built up; we’ve built the trust up over the years basically and, you know, we just get on and do the maintenance. They’re happy. And if we do any alterations, they’re happy as long as we ask.
Lyndsey: Yeah, cos there’s a lot of wild trails built and the kids come and say ‘ooh we built this track and now the forestry have come and knocked it down’ and you say ‘well, did you ask permission?’. ‘Ooh no, none of that’. You know if you work together, then it’s so much better.
The problem is these lads now with their abilities – they build things to suit them… you get a little lad who’s just bought a bike on Saturday, thinks he can do this, and then makes a massive jump with no easy way round.
With our races, we’re classed as Regional A, aren’t we? And a lot of people see our events as the place to start racing. We’d like to attract the top lads, but they come more for an enjoyable event, like Brendan Fairclough will often say ‘this is such good fun’. And you know, you’re not out to scare anybody, but you’ve just got to hit that level somehow where it’s testing, but not too easy.
Like some courses are more testing than others, but we’ve noticed these last few years, well two or three years, the juveniles and the youth category, the entries have gone sky high, what used to be a massive senior (category) has now dropped – it shows that a lot of young people want to come through to it.
So over the last few years, how has the uptake for the races changed?
Lyndsey: It has changed; I mean you’d only get 12 to 15 juveniles and now we’re getting 30 to 40. And youth is now the biggest category, maybe 50 plus.
Dave: Yeah, the actual entries for the races now aren’t quite so quick to fill; they’ve slowed down quite a bit. But you know, one time we’d fill up within ten minutes probably. For a couple of years, to get the shop known, we said to people if they came to the shop to enter on a Saturday morning, they’d be guaranteed an entry. First year we had quite a few, didn’t we? First year we coped, and we were hoping they’d buy some stuff while they were here as well. The second year it was just manic! The shop was totally full, they were queuing outside…
Lyndsey: And down the road!
Dave: There was no chance you could buy anything, because they were too crammed in, waiting to get an entry; they’d come from London to enter, all over the place.
Lyndsey: Well, you were on car parking (Dave), and we’d even got them [the cars] in the workshop… we’d got a car on the ramp, lift that up, and a car parked underneath, we just couldn’t fit ’em in!
Dave: And the road was getting blocked as well… we were thinking ‘god we’re going to get in trouble here’ with the locals.
Lyndsey: We’d said if they came before 10 o’clock they were guaranteed an entry because that’s when it went live on the website, so we had to process all those entries before 10 o’clock and by 10 past, everything was full. So, six races at 300 [entrants] meant all were full!
It feels to me like you invented the uplift, how did that come about? I remember when you had the stock trailers and the grain trailers…
Dave: Well, yeah, we were the first. When you say to people you do uplift with a Land Rover with the bikes on a trailer behind, they say ‘well, what d’ya mean?’, if you say, well it’s similar to a ski lift, they accept it.
Lyndsey: It’s amazing how it’s evolved when you look back at pictures and you’ve got people in the back of a trailer…
Dave: Yeah, the double-decker… they used to be standing on top…
Lyndsey: He built this double-decker; The safety is just…
Dave: There’s several pictures, you think ‘oh my god, don’t show them’…
What is it that makes a good event/race?
Lyndsey: Good venue, good track.
Dave: For a downhill, the most important thing is the uplift: if you don’t have an uplift you’ve got nothing. Because you’ve got nothing to take them up to the top and that’s what they want. If you haven’t got that, you just have people who are disappointed… they’ve had four runs all weekend and that’s why downhill hasn’t moved on really. It’s gone backwards I think… possibly, there’s fewer doing it now.
Backwards in terms of?
Dave: Well the uplift… we’ve got a good uplift service, but we’re the only ones really who can do the uplift for racing – it’s just so expensive to actually get the thing in place, you know, bus companies don’t want to come because they dirty their buses – it’s very difficult, it is.
Lyndsey: Well, you’re being asked more and more to provide the service, like nationals.
Dave: We’ve got three next year they’ve asked us to do.
Lyndsey: Just the uplift…
Dave: In some ways, the finances to go and work for them and stay in Bringewood and do two days, means financially we’d probably be better off doing Bringewood. Because you know, we’ve just done a price now for a national at Llangollen and with the VAT it comes to about eleven grand. Well, it’s a lot of money. Ridiculous amount of money.
Lyndsey: Which is all passed on through the entry fee and everything, but…
Dave: It works out about £20 a person, if you get 300.
Just to cover the uplift?
Dave: Just the uplift, yeah, and that’s working on £30 p/h per Land Rover – driver, fuel, maintenance, tax, insurance – it goes on and on and on. So it is very difficult from an organiser’s point of view to actually get that in place.
Lyndsey: But, yeah, still, the track comes a close second.
Dave: Oh, yeah, the track comes into it, definitely, oh definitely. They’re all important elements to it definitely. But if you can’t get ’em to the top… you can’t give the customer a good… because for downhill, time on your bike isn’t very long… you can get 15 runs in a day, possibly on the Saturday, well that’s 15 runs of 2 minutes, so that’s 30 minutes and then you’ve got two or three practice runs on the Sunday morning, so there’s another six mins, then you’ve got two race runs through the day. So, value for money, it’s not great really.
Do you think that’s why gravity enduros are so popular?
Dave: Yes, sure.
Lyndsey: It’s a lot more riding time isn’t it?
You’ve dabbled a couple of times with gravity enduro?
Lyndsey: We were talking about this last night weren’t we?
Dave: Yeah.
Lyndsey: You find, that, first of all there’s no governing body.
Dave: That’s right, that’s one reason why we don’t do it, because there’s no governing body to it, well there is, but there isn’t – you haven’t got the backing of British Cycling, THE governing body of cycling have you? If anything happens, British Cycling have got quite a strong team of lawyers or whatever.
Lyndsey: But there’s people doing enduro races on downhill courses. So for a downhill course you’ve got to have it fully taped, fully marshalled, blah, blah, blah… and all the gear. And then the next week you could be running an enduro, which is not taped, not so many marshals, not such strict regulations… It’s really weird.
Dave: In my opinion, it’s unfortunate. I thought that gravity might have been a stepping stone to downhill, but it isn’t really.
Why do you think that is?
Dave: Well I think there’s too many downhillers gone into gravity. [Laughter] they want the aggressive stuff; the beginner then is stuffed with a downhill track really and he’s come on his cross-country bike. [Laughter] It could’ve been massive I think, gravity. You know, especially if you can do a journey, a circuit, go stage to stage. Fantastic day out.
Lyndsey: Well you can ride up with your mates, chat, chat, chat about what you’re gonna do, then at the bottom off to the next course – it’s a much more social event… with our races, you do your one race in the morning then you’ve got probably a two-hour wait ’til you race again.
Dave: But they do have a good old chat in the Land Rover like, you learn all sorts of things. [Laughter] But they’re chatting about the lines, and ‘what line you taking?’ and ‘ahh I’m not taking that line’, you know, and they’re bantering away… Sometimes they’re as quiet as a mouse, and you think ‘ah they’re a bit serious now’, but they enjoy it…
Dave: We’re in a good position in some ways, because our courses suit gravity bikes and downhill bikes – it depends again on the rider, we’ve had a gravity bike win the Elite category, but it depends who’s there and who’s riding, but you get a good rider, the likes of Marc Beaumont, him and Matt Simmonds were both on gravity bikes and I think Simmonds won in the end didn’t he?
Lyndsey: I can’t remember.
It strikes me you could put either of those two on a unicycle and they’d still go well.
Dave: Yeah exactly, that’s what it is, so yeah, the gravity bike is definitely capable.
Yeah, and does suit your races, as you say…
Dave: Oh, absolutely yeah.
What do you see the next chapter being?
Dave: Well ultimately with the racing, I don’t want to retire yet, quite. But I’d love someone to take it on to the same standards that we’re doing it. And that’s a big ask! Well the team we’ve got, not me, or Lyndsey, it’s what we’ve got round us that counts. And for somebody to get that team up and running… It’d be a shame to see it all go. But again, it would be a shame to see it go to pot.
Lyndsey: Yeah you’d either have to stop completely… Like at one time somebody offered to buy all the Land Rovers, and do the uplift, but I know that he [Dave] wouldn’t sit, couldn’t sit by, if he saw somebody, this guy, not doing it right…
I mean, anyone who’s organised an event knows how stressful it can be. Organising a group of friends to go out can be difficult enough so organising an event for hundreds of people, it’s a big commitment isn’t it?
Lyndsey: Well, when it was us two only, you lived it, you talked about it at night, all the time. Whereas other people have families, other commitments and they can’t commit to that… Ideally you need a team or somebody to do all the marshalling, somebody to do all the track marking or whatever rather than us doing it. And you can’t just find that.
Is it that attention to detail which makes the difference?
Lyndsey: Well this is it, silly things like, what race organiser would be filling the toilets with toilet roll? Him [Dave], or the toilet’s blocked ‘oh I’ll come and give it a shake’, you know, you shouldn’t be doing that, or picking rubbish up and things like that. But us, we do everything! So um, yeah it’s just, that’s how we are. It’s the same with the shop – I make the tea; I do the cleaning ‘oh are you the owner?’… Uh yeah. [Laughter] So, that’s just how we are. And, always will be I think…
Sitting down with Dave and Lindsey was a real treat for me. I’ve known them for years and I was still left feeling blown away by what they have done for mountain biking. They’ve been in the game for over 30 years and have left a huge mark on the UK cycling scene, especially mountain biking.
When you think of all the riders who have come through their race series, it’s mind-blowing! Without the impact of Dave and Lindsey, UK mountain biking would look very different. Would we have gone on to produce some of the best downhill riders in the world without their contribution? It’s genuinely hard to say.
Chatting to Dave and Lyndsey made me feel that we are at a bit of a crossroads with UK downhill. There’s a small number of people who are putting in the graft to keep the whole thing afloat, so what does the future hold? Who are the next Dave and Lyndsey? Is it even possible for anyone else to do what they do? I really don’t know, but what I do know is that I’m glad they do what they do and I take my hat off to them.
