Uncle Dave Blind Tests Buttercups

There’s a saying that we have in my house. “Stop being such a Hungarian.” We trot this out when somebody interprets a passing mention of a subject as a deep interest. The phrase originates in Hungary, of all places, from all of the times that we have visited our relatives there. These trips generally incorporate:

• A lot of people asking “what did they just say?”
• Lots and lots of elaborate deserts
• Driving places, stopping, listening to people talk in Hungarian while they point at something, then climbing back into your car and asking “what were we just looking at and why?”

Confusion reigns, really.

Now, back to the subject at hand, I find that if I’m ever to mention a subject or ask a question, my Hungarian relatives will assume that I must be super interested and that I must immediately have/visit the thing I’ve asked about. In their mind, there would be no reason to ask a question about something short of a burning desire. They’re a very literal group, short on nuance (my relatives...not necessarily all Hungarians). Ask about the dessert wine that the region you just drove through is known for? Why, here’s several bottles that we procured from god knows where as our village only has a store that opens for a few hours a day and sells soda water, cigarettes and watermelon. Ask about the status of the national football team? Well here’s a strange hat, emblazoned with a soccer ball and “HUNGARY!!!” Whatever you do, do not let these people know that you have a favourite food.

Right now, it sort of feels like this is happening with this Buttercup thing. Ya, I wrote about Buttercups. Does that mean I’m actually interested in what they are or what they do? Well, no, not really. It feels like perhaps somebody may have missed the point. Is it me? Is it them? I’m not really sure. But here we are, many months and e-mails later. I’ve run out of excuses and I guess I have no choice but to ride around in the rain and determine if Buttercups make a difference in a fork.

Baseline

The baseline for the test was a pair of identical Santa Cruz Nomads, save for frame colour and the fork internals. One blue, one yellow. One fork was a stock Zeb Ultimate, complete with the aforementioned Buttercups, and the other a non stock Zeb Ultimate, complete with all of the bells and whistles save for a dummy block in place of the Buttercups.

I picked one of the bikes up a few days ahead of time for a shakedown and setup ride. Having never ridden a Nomad, I was pleasantly surprised by how she went. Similar to the Megatower, this bike pedals well for its size. When I bent down mid ride to check the tire spec I was flabbergasted by what I found. Maxx Grip DH Casing! Why, those tires were sucking at least half of my meager output! Imagine how fast you could go up the hill with wheels shod in something other than millionaire rubber!

Going down, the bike felt pleasantly forgiving. As I thought about it, perhaps too forgiving? How am I going to sense anything within all of that plush travel? My shakedown lap wasn’t nearly enough to challenge this bike, but once the trail opened up a bit, there was fun to be had. I’d love to do some back-to-backs with a Megatower, but the Nomad wasn’t too far off what I remembered about that bike.

For settings I mostly went straight to the Santa Cruz setup guide as a starting point:

Fork – 70 psi, Rebound 9 Clicks from closed, LSC -2 clicks, HSC middle, no tokens

Shock – 200 psi, LSC Middle

Shock rebound was my only real deviation. The adjuster knob is a real pain to get at on the Nomad (all tucked in there under a little mud fender), so I just gave it an extra click or two from where it was set and called it a day. This proved to be 13 clicks from closed, which sounds pretty quick to me, but was fine.

For the terrain I was riding, the fork was fine and these were my settings for the entirety of the test. I was using up to around 95% travel each test lap and never experienced a bottom. I would likely experiment with going a bit firmer or inserting a token if I was running this fork long term.

The shock was way too soft. After my shakedown and before our first lap the morning of the test we bumped the pressure all the way up to 225 psi. This put me closer to the correct sag range and was much closer to correct. Again, this put me at a place where I was hitting 95% travel each test lap, without experiencing bottom.

First Laps

You never know what you’re going to get for weather on a Vancouver November day. Rolling into the parking lot all I could think about were all of the nice, warm riding clothes that I had left behind at home. As the snowflakes hit the windshield on the drive to the top, it felt more like a day of survival than of searching for minor differences in feeling from a suspension fork. It was pointed out later on that Buttercups are far less sensitive in cold temperatures, as well. So, wins all around, really.

Once rolling though, the day improved. There was a bit of moisture in the trails, but far less than the sky suggested. The trail itself was a new one for me, and was just about perfect for our purposes. It was smooth enough to allow for us to keep our speeds up a little bit, but with sections full of lots of small little repetitive bumps. There were some steeper bits and some flatter bits, some drops and some jumps. It was not a bad little trail to hit over and over and over again.

Along with the bikes and the trails came Chris Mandell from SRAM. In a previous life, Chris spent a lot of time testing suspension settings. He had some great advice for those of us testing suspension:

• Don’t ride over your head
• Be as consistent as possible
• Repeat and minimize variables

There were a few more pieces of advice, but I’ve forgotten them. Besides his wisdom, Chris was there to guide us through our test, answer all of our questions and ensure that things ran smoothly.

Bike #1

The first bike was the bike from my shakedown ride, albeit with a new fork and more pressure in the rear, as described above. The first lap wound up being a sighting lap, more than anything, so we went around for a second lap on the same bike, to get a better feel for how it rode.

Under these conditions, the Nomad is a bike that I would happily ride all day, every day. By the second lap I was super comfortable, and happily riding at 90% of my typical pace. This felt like as solid a baseline as I could ask for in order to make a comparison.

Bike #2

Like a formula 1 pit crew, Chris had the second Nomad swapped over with my pedals and settings and we were back to the top. I pedaled around in a few circles and bounced on the suspension a few times. “How different is this going to feel? Major difference, or subtle?” Chris shrugged his shoulders. He admitted that even he didn’t know which fork was which, because he didn’t want to influence the findings. I pedaled into the trail fairly worried that I wasn’t going to be able to sense any difference.

Upon my wheel touching down after the first little jump, ten feet into the trail, I was no longer worried, and could feel that something was different. A few seconds after that I was mostly convinced this was the Buttercup bike. I couldn’t quite put my finger on the word, but Deniz provided me with “muted”, and that fit perfectly. Everything was just a bit less jarring, and a bit softer. I felt less through my hands and my forearms. I felt a bit more in control. In order to feel the difference between the two bikes I was expecting to have to really concentrate on the portions of the trail where I the buttercups are supposed to shine, but to me the fork felt quite different everywhere. Once I told these things to Chris he admitted that it usually isn’t a subtle change for most of their testers.

Back to Bike #1

Having determined that there was a change in feeling and that it was noticeable, the next few laps were spent trying to hone in on exactly what was happening, and where. We moved back to Bike #1 to see what it would feel like reversing the change. My angst returned when things didn’t feel noticeably different. Nothing felt overly harsh. Had the change to Bike #2 been all in my mind?

Then, about halfway down the run I realized that while my brain didn’t scream at me that something was different, this run felt terrible! My hands and forearms were starting to feel tired. I was braking harder and I was standing up more into the corners. It felt like all of my mistakes were compounding. My harder braking was slowing me down, causing bumps to be more noticeable, resulting in more hand and arm fatigue, causing me to brake harder. It was difficult to feel a difference over any one set of bumps, but the sum total of the run told the story.

Back to Bike #2

For the final lap of the day, it was back onto Bike #2. Again, the first few turns didn’t feel unusual to me. There were no new feelings to wrap my head around and everything felt familiar. I think that I had swapped back and forth so many times between the bikes that I was past the point where I could easily pick up on small changes. Like 2 different pairs of well worn shoes, they both felt familiar to me, even though they were different. It was harder to pick out those really small differences.

However, when I got down to the point on the trail when I really started to notice my hand and forearm fatigue on the previous lap, it wasn’t there. And then when I hit the flatter, faster, bumpier bits where I thought I would really notice the Buttercups, I most definitely did. There was a noticeable reduction in the small spikes my hands felt through terrain like this. Further down on the trail there were some faster berms with braking bumps leading into them. Again, the bike was smoother and more composed. It was easier to ride faster.

What the hell is going on here?

If you look back to the article that got me into all of this trouble, you’ll note that the premise is along the lines of “how did SRAM convince everybody that a couple of rubber pucks is an important advancement in suspension design?” Now, my thoughts are similar, but more along the lines of “how in the hell can a couple of small rubber pucks feel so noticeably different?” I hummed and hawed and made a few excuses when this idea was pitched to me, largely because I didn’t think I’d be able to tell the difference and I thought that might make me look like a bit of an idiot. I was a bit shocked that this wasn’t the case. For the telling the difference part, anyhow.

Now, while I was able to feel a difference between two identical bikes on back-to-back runs, this feels like a good time to throw out some caveats. Does this mean that you should throw your non Buttercup equipped fork in the trash? Are you immediately going to ride better once you have your Buttercups installed? I would say no to both of those questions. I was very happy riding the non-Buttercup bike for the first 2 runs. It took a very specific experience to be able to feel the difference between the 2 bikes. That said, if given the choice between Bike #1 and Bike #2, I would easily choose Bike #2 (and I have video proof that I, with absolute certainty, called this out correctly as the Buttercup bike).

I’m less certain that I would have been able to make this call without immediately riding the trails back-to-back on two well tuned and identically set up bicycles. If forced permanently to the non-Buttercup bike, it likely would only take me another run or two to adapt back to it. Yes, I think that at the end of a long ride I would feel like I had ridden more smoothly and wound up less fatigued if I had Bike #2 (the Buttercup bike, that is). It was a noticeable improvement, but fairly special circumstances were required to feel it with absolute certainty.

Still, it can’t be discounted that I could feel the Buttercups and they were better. Further to that, the fork felt better in most areas, not just in the small, high frequency bumps SRAM spent so much time talking about. To try to wrap my brain around why this is, I went back to this technology story that SRAM told, and this graph in particular, to see if I could understand what I was feeling.

This didn't really do it for me, though. This doesn't go far enough towards explaining the feeling. When I pressed Chris on this he told me that what I am experiencing is what RockShox has been referring to as "touchdown" - that feeling of your suspension in the first percentage of travel - which has been an area of focus for them in both the front and the back. I was hoping there was some magical little graph that RockShox could produce to show me exactly what I was feeling, but I guess that will have to wait until the next article.

In Conclusion

To avoid the mis-interpretations I feel I'm creating recently with most of my articles recently, I thought I'd write a clear, simple, concise summary of all that has come to this point. My biggest takeaway from this whole process is that I likely need to do a lot more controlled testing of various products. It was really cool to be able to isolate one tiny little thing on a bike and feel the difference that it made. It showed me that all of these little refinements likely add up to improvements in our cycling experience. It also showed me that we're incredibly adaptable things, us humans, and that we get used to things very, very quickly.

I don't actually know if the above discovery is a good thing or a bad thing. I'm happy that I was able to feel a difference between the forks. I'm a bit sad that I'm reinforcing that the latest and greatest thing might actually be the latest and greatest thing. I'm confused by what this means for all of you, and your hard earned dollars.

Frickin' SRAM marketing department strikes again!