Interview: Lal Bikes founder and Supre Drive inventor Cedric Eveleigh

Even in an era when mountain biking seems to be turning back towards its wild west past, few bikes stand out as strongly as Lal Bikes’ Katana. Built on the Sunshine Coast of steel and carbon fibre to showcase the brand’s unique Supre Drive drivetrain, the Katana is the brainchild of Cedric Eveleigh and his small team at Lal.

After riding the Katana we sat down to talk to Eveleigh more about why he created the Supre Drive, what it’s like challenging a century or so of established design tradition, and what the process of developing the Katana’s been like.

If you’re more interested in the features of the bike, we had a quick chat with Eveleigh when the Katana first launched that talks a lot more about the bike. If you want to find out how the Katana rides, check out our mini-review. But, if you want to get deep into the weeds about what it’s like to take on the bike industry head-on, what he learned working with Nicolai and even a tangent about street cleaners, dive in.

Canadian MTB: Ok, so we just finished a ride on the Katana. You had another demo this morning. How does it feel spending so much time developing this bike and then getting to go out and watch other people’s first ride on it?

It’s awesome. Mountain bikes are amazing machines. It’s such a neat process to go from your ideas for a new kind of suspension system to your design in 3D. Then you make it, and then people ride it, and it’s, like, this physical machine that people are riding down the hill. And it’s come from your brain. It’s such a cool cycle.

This isn’t the first bike to feature a Supre Drive. How does that feeling of watching someone ride the Katana compare with, say, seeing the Nicolai that used Supre Drive, after having literally made all the parts for the Katana in your workshop?

It’s quite different. It was sick to see people riding the Nicolai. I remember being in Germany at one point visiting them, and we were on a ride with their race team. So we were four people, all riding bikes with the drivetrain that I invented. That was a really cool moment, actually, because that was the first time that I rode with other people who were also on the Supre Drive. Until that point, it had always been one-off prototypes that I had been developing.

But now, it’s quite different. It’s one thing to develop the drive. But with the Katana frame, the suspension system is quite unique and the materials we use are pretty special. Just from a technology point of…