Trek Factory Racing DH is racing prototype Sessions all season. Here’s why.

No covers, no strategic close-ups, no coy language. The Trek Factory Racing Downhill team will be riding a work-in-progress, prototype Session all season as they race for the top step, and you can look at it, pick it apart, and ogle to your heart’s content. 

Normally we’d be trying to maintain some veil of secrecy about an unreleased bike (as much as one can in the smartphone age), but the TFR DH squad is undergoing a small, yet significant philosophy change. Since 2019, the team has largely raced on production downhill race bikes. This year, they’ll be riding custom frames based on the Session architecture. And as the season progresses you’ll see the frame evolve.

The decision was made in response to the increasingly competitive racing scene. Trek athletes are the brand’s best testers. Every Trek bike and product — from the new Madone, to tires, to helmets — is put through the ringer with some of the best riders in the world. But often when Trek develops a product that athletes love, they have to wait to use it in competition until production can be scaled up to meet consumer demand. Now, TFR DH will be riding the absolute fastest rigs that Trek engineers can muster at every World Cup round. 

“Every time we test with the team, we develop a new bike, and they’re like, ‘Great, can we have it?’ And we’re like, ‘Yeah, in a year and a half when we launch the new bike,'” says Dylan Howes, a Senior MTB Engineer at Trek who leads the development of the brand’s future line of mountain bikes.”This is a way you go, ‘OK, forget production. Let’s get them what they need now, right away.'”

Howes likens the approach to Formula 1 racing, a sport in which technological innovation is a competition in itself. There are nearly as many ways to tune downhill mountain bikes as there are souped-up race cars, and smart tweaks that help riders adjust to the course and conditions can make the difference between standing on the podium and not.

Take an even deeper dive into the bike in Matt Walker’s bike check with Vital MTB:

The philosophical shift was sparked by a number: point-oh-six-two. That’s all that separated Lachie Stevens-McNab — 0.062 seconds — from winning the DH World Cup season finale in Mont-Sainte-Anne last season while racing on a Session as a member of The Union. The brand new member of TFR DH had a breakout 2024, taking two World Cup podiums. His result in MSA got the team and Trek’s engineers thinking about how to make up the whisper-thin difference that could put Lachie on the top step this season.

They isolated one issue: The Session’s high pivot design is rip-roaringly fast and smooth over big obstacles, but it doesn’t corner as well as riders would like. The high main pivot allows the back end to elongate significantly as it reaches high speeds, giving the bike great stability, but also giving it a tendency to “stand up” in corners, as Howes puts it.

The team set out with a design philosophy of “two ‘-ers’ and a ‘just as.'” In other words, they wanted to significantly improve two aspects of the bike — in this case, making the Session lighter and “corner-ier” — while keeping it just as fast in a straight line. They built off the current Session but used the previous generation, which was slightly more agile with its lower pivot, as inspiration.

Howes and company came up with an adjustable pivot with three settings. Depending on their preferences and the track, riders can move the pivot up or down to shift the bike’s personality towards cornering or speed. The engineering team also implemented carbon chainstays and seatstays, and it is experimenting with tube shapes and how they affect ride quality. But the adjustability of the main pivot is potentially a game changing feature for the TFR DH gang, especially on a bike that is already proven at the highest level, having won seven world championships during its history, including the Men’s Elite title in 2024.

Work on the 2025 prototype Session began in early fall 2024. The revamped TFR DH team has worked directly with Trek, SRAM, and RockShox engineers at team camps in December, January and forthcoming in March to test and tune the bike exactly to their liking.

“I think the riders’ reaction has been very positive, because they can get exactly what they’re looking for,” Howes says. “So instead of trying to find a balance of, ‘OK, this one’s working pretty well for everybody.’ We can go, ‘OK, Lachie’s got exactly what he wants. Matt Walker has what’s working for him.’ It might be the same, but very likely they’re going to be slightly different.”

The question you may be asking yourself now is “When can I get one?” The answer is “Unknown, and maybe not ever.” Howes and his crew are focused on making the fastest bikes they can, period, and that means creating machines that may not even handle very well except in the hands of professional riders who can push the equipment to its absolute limit.

But by breaching the bounds of engineering, Howes and company are learning a lot about the future of Trek bikes, from the next consumer version of the Session, to the Supercaliber, to the Fuel EX. Trek is making a different sort of bet, looking for the cutting edge of performance and letting that technology eventually filter to consumers once it’s ready and replicable for mass production.

In the meantime, Trek engineers are now free to live their best mad scientist lives. No more hiding or holding back. Trek will always be iterating in pursuit of riding nirvana, letting the best riders and mechanical minds in the business guide the process. All in the name of podiums, and most importantly, better bikes.