Sunday was a lot of fun – we trucked down to one of our favourite local downhill spots, chose a short testing track and got to work on getting the bikes setup for next weekend’s Fort William Saracen British Downhill Series race.
A massive extra asset to the team this year is our mate Oscar. Oscar works for TFTuned (they’re experts at suspension setup and tuning) and is coming to all of the races this year to make sure that the guy’s bikes are running tip top. Oscar joined us on Sunday to focus on getting the guys Cane Creek Double Barrel and Boxxer suspension tuned a bit more specifically for the rough, fast hits of the Fort.
The process was pretty simple – we picked a short, fast, rough track with lots of little rough hits and lots of corners and we smashed the shit out of it all day. We stuck to the same track for almost all of the day and used the guy’s feedback to help Oscar work out their base settings on the suspension. From there, he could start trying out different setups and listening again to how they thought they worked.
In the end, we didn’t need to change a huge amount it was more about fine tuning than massive leaps. The main thing was just to get the their suspension to sit in the travel where they wanted … but still in a way that it could respond to the track. Both Rich and Jay immediately jumped up to a firmer spring than the ones that they had run previously and both ended up running a bit more compression than normal, with Jay’s setup coming out slightly firmer than Rich’s to cope with him being a bigger unit! Â The big surprise is always quite how firm both of them run their setups to cope with how much faster they ride than the ‘average’ person!
Huge thanks to Oscar and everyone at TFTuned for their support this year – it’s a massive boost! Click the link below to visit their site and see what they can do for you.
