New bike business steps up a gear

Wednesday 03 August 2016

A new business has pedalled its way into the Island, and is all set to take the shock out of riding mountain bikes and motorbikes.

Fast Suspension have spent the last two years working on developing suspension kits for mountain bikes.

The man behind it is Fabien Glatre, who has got together a team of engineers and investors in Jersey, and even a stunt man, and plans to compete with big names in the business - Ohlins and Fox.

Engineer Alex Wood said: “Fabien has a patent pending on a way that radically improves the way that suspension works, he’s patented a component which increases the speed at which the shock reacts, for lighter vehicles it’s harder to get that to work and he’s got that working on mountain bikes and he’s sold it all the way through to Autocross.

“We’ve moved it here, the concept being we’ll train up some locals, we’ve brought the machine technicians, and Fabien. We want to develop all the way through from mountain bikes to rally cars, the full range of suspension, do all the research and development here.

“Lee is a stunt man, he did all the stunts for James Bond, did all the stunts for Angelina Jolie, he’s doing Transformers next. He’s a Grand Prix motorcross racer so he’s going to involved in helping us develop a lot of the products.”

“We’ve got all the ingredients without spending vast amounts of money to help make this a big business. To give you an idea of the size of the industry, Fox – who are our direct competitor – they do a hundred million dollars a quarter, four hundred million a year in suspension, before all the caps and tee shirts, 60 million of that is in mountain bikes and motorcross, so it’s a big industry.

“The concept is that we research, develop it here in Jersey and we find global manufacturing partners to make the volume.”

“The product is being used by Marcus Klausmann, who’s 16 times German champion. We know the product is good enough, we just need the exposure and potentially it could be as big a business as some of our competitors.

“We’d like to have as much of it from Jersey. I’m very passionate, that we have another engineering business here in oil and gas, I’m very passionate that what Jersey can do is create intellectual property which is from Jersey and then it is very difficult to attack.

“If you say how come you are selling a hundred million of that product around the world, it’s kind of like well we invented it here, of course we are going to keep the profits here. The opportunities, we’ve got lots of bright people we can train up in Jersey, this could end up employing 25 / 30 people and we can train them here so that’s the real story.”

The team are now looking to raise a quarter of a million pounds to develop their product lines.