How Brandon Semenuk shaped Trek bike development

At Trek, athletes drive innovation. The premise is simple: If Trek engineers can make a bike fast enough for Mads Pedersen or Evie Richards, it’ll almost certainly make customers happy, too. The company’s brightest mechanical minds work directly with those athletes to create race machines fit for their lofty ambitions.

But for an athlete like Brandon Semenuk — and the entire C3 Project crew, for that matter — the calculus is a bit different. Anyone can aspire to throw down mega wattage on their local roads or trails, but few people on Earth can even think of attempting what Semenuk can do — at least not safely. A bike capable of winning Red Bull Rampage — something Semenuk has done five times, more than anyone — may not be the best machine for mastering your relatively tame local dirt jumps.

Instead, working with an athlete like Semenuk allows Trek engineers — specifically, the team in Trek’s Proto Shop — to let their freak flags fly. It’s hard to make a bike that’s nimble, durable, and capable on any terrain — maneuverable enough to spin, flip, and fly through the air, but also able to withstand the harsh impacts from odd angles that such creativity demands. Engineering a bike to fit Semenuk’s standards takes a combination of mad science, obsession, and ingenuity.

Every bike that Semenuk competes on may be a custom prototype, but the passion and know-how in each one has influenced many of the bikes that have landed in the hands of satisfied customers for two decades, from suspension, to tubing lines and contours, to the safety standards that every new model must pass before entering bike shops. No one can ride like Semenuk, but in one way or another, anyone on a Trek mountain bike can feel his impact.

Semenuk and the C3 squad are such specialized athletes that they rarely get to help test and develop most of Trek’s consumer mountain bikes, but one still stands out. The Ticket originated in 2004 when Cam McCaul asked Trek’s mountain bike engineers to make a jumpier version of the Session 7. Senior Mountain Bike Engineer Dylan Howes recalls essentially shrinking the Session and giving it four inches of travel. In the process, he helped kick start a slopestyle dynasty. 

Semenuk signed with Trek in 2005, at just 14 years old, and instantly became an invaluable resource due to his attention to detail. He has worked with Howes and the MTB development team for the last 20 years, and in that time has requested adjustments to his frame as small as a few millimeters to the length of his top tube, or a few tenths of a degree in his head tube angle. When the Ticket launched to consumers in 2010, it had been battle tested and refined for half a decade by two of the most influential riders ever in Semenuk and McCaul.

With the addition of Brett Rheeder to C3 in 2012, Trek suddenly had three generationally talented mountain bikers to work with, which eventually led to an even bolder project: The first ever full suspension bike to compete at Crankworx — a.k.a., the Ticket S — which released to consumers in 2013.

The Ticket S is still the gold standard of slopestyle bikes, a platform that Semenuk still rides, as well as current Crankworx slopestyle gold medal record holder Emil Johansson (a record, mind you, that had been held by Semenuk until 2023). Though admittedly, their bikes aren’t exactly like the production models. The prototypes they ride have evolved gradually over the years into perhaps the most purpose-built machine out of Waterloo, Wisc.

“In the latest version, we took everything in as tight as we could,” Howes says. “Normally, we say we want 10 millimeters of clearance between the rocker link and the frame. We chopped that down to like three or four. We made the bike as narrow as possible, getting close to their hardtail, and smoothed everything over so that they have nothing to catch their feet and knees on as they’re twisting that bike in unimaginable ways.”

Semenuk may have helped pioneer a legendary slopestyle bike, but he’s ridden just about every mountain bike Trek makes across competitions and mind-blowing video edits. His polymathic mastery of Trek’s arsenal has one consequence: Pushing bikes to their absolute limit means occasionally breaking them. 

To reiterate: Few people have ever been able to move a mountain bike the way Semenuk can. And because of that, he has helped Trek engineers stress test equipment in ways that they could never replicate in a lab. Best of all, he’s often surrounded by a dedicated team of filmers and photographers, who are able to provide Trek engineers with high quality, multi-angle imagery of what took place.

“He has a slow motion camera a lot of times, or at least a very high film rate camera with high resolution,” Matt Yerke, a Senior Design Engineer at Trek, says. “We’ve been able to see what happened, what type of situation, in great detail.”

Howes recalls a period more than a decade ago when Semenuk would regularly snap seatstays while doing spinning tricks, which led to creative strengthening solutions and pushed Trek to develop harsher lab tests for brakes and seatstays. Yerke helped develop a test for what has become known as the “C3 standard” in Trek’s testing lab. Now, prototype bikes being used in extreme events must be able to pass a splay test, enacted by a large machine that pulls frames apart from both ends, essentially recreating the force of a very badly cased jump. That splay test has come to be used on more and more bikes in Trek’s catalog, even trail bikes.

And through years of meeting high safety standards, Trek engineers have gathered the institutional knowledge needed to keep making bikes that are both burly and capable of elite performance. 

“It does give us this opportunity to benchmark the strength of a bike,” Howes says. “It gives you confidence to build the next prototypes for some other project, and go, ‘All right, if we just go one step up on these tubes, we can build a batch of prototypes that we can put testers on, and we don’t have to lab test every prototype we build.'”

Semenuk is a great example of why long relationships matter. With the help of two decades of stockpiled learnings, Howes and the proto shop team have been working with Semenuk for the last two years on building and refining a brand new bike from the ground up: The 2024 Rampage-winning “Sesh.” 

The bike was Brandon’s idea. He wanted a bike that was as capable as the downhill-oriented Session he had been using at freeride mountain biking’s premiere event, but modernized, more stable, and with greater maneuverability. His initial task to Trek’s proto team was to make a Gen 5 Slash geometry-fit to 27.5-inch wheels. Over time, however, he pushed for other characteristics like greater suspension travel, lower standover height, and slacker head tube angles, until the project had morphed into something unlike anything in Trek’s diverse portfolio of bikes.

The Sesh features Slash and Session tubing — hence the portmanteau — but with new center lines, new rocker links, and new shock mounts. It has 180 millimeters of travel and can flip between a 26″ and 27.5″ rear wheel. Only Brandon Semenuk could dream of such a rig, but in the process of making it real, Howes’ team is building a database of knowledge.

“We always get some learning out of it,” Howes says. “In this case it’s, ‘How do we package this frame to get this much travel and low standover?’ You keep learning new little tricks of, ‘Well, we’ll just do these pivots that way for this bike.’ And then you realize, ‘Oh, that actually worked. That pivot design could trickle to a trail bike, or to something else.'”

The Sesh is maybe the ultimate Semenuk machine — capable of pure elegance in the rowdiest settings. It looks like poetry in motion with Semenuk at the helm. Just rewatch his Rampage run, or his gorgeous, Video of the Year-winning edit “Afterlife,” to see it in action. Semenuk is a meticulous athlete with big asks for Trek’s engineering teams. But when the outcome is the highest form of art in mountain biking, the effort is worthwhile.

It takes a village to make a Semenuk-worthy bike. Not just a team of engineers, but welders, industrial designers, painters, and a whole host of people involved in the logistics of getting the bike in Semenuk’s hands in some far-off location. Howes estimates that once a Semenuk prototype frame has been designed, it takes about four weeks to physically make it, from machining the parts, welding the frame, then getting the bike painted, built, boxed, and shipped. And that’s if there’s nothing else on their plates — often Trek employees work on one-off prototypes outside of their regular jobs overseeing the brand’s consumer fleet.

They’re motivated by seeing their handiwork on mountain biking’s biggest stages, being utilized at a superhuman level by an unparalleled athlete.

“The biggest part is, it’s just fun that we still get to do these projects,” Howes says. “From a design and development standpoint, it’s a lot of us just going like, ‘All right, we want to make this happen. This bike is cool. We need to make this happen. If it takes me a week of late nights and an extra weekend or two, let’s just get it done.'”

Semenuk has an outsized influence on how Trek makes bikes better for everyone. But more than that, he’s a beacon of possibility. It doesn’t matter if you’re a newbie rider on a Marlin or a Masters-wielding engineer with a gonzo mountain biking habit. No one can do what Semenuk does, but anyone can aspire to push their limits and strive for a purer expression of themselves on two wheels. 

“What he does on the bike is a visual interpretation of what everyone wants to feel on a bike,” Yerke says. “The Sesh project is the extreme version of that. There’s a reason why Rampage is such a spectacle, right? Everybody thinks it’s amazing. It’s the most hardcore thing that mountain bikers do. And Brandon is at the very top of that, and this bike helped him get there. 

“All these toys represent possibilities. And he is the utmost of those possibilities in what he films and creates. I think they help us all realize that we can do more on our bike.”

You don’t need to ride a Semenuk-worthy rig to be inspired by what he can do. Watching him bend a bike to his will is enough to make you wonder what you can do yourself.