Neils, thanks for the fantastic review.
As my personal rig sits incredibly closely to this one (150mm fork, 127mm rear travel effectively, Horst link), I keep reaching a lot of the same conclusions about what the bike excels with, and the tire selection dependency for something like this ends up being really tricky.
MaxxGrip out front becomes basically a requirement for using these bikes to their potential, because using the front center to its potential requires lots of grip, and it's not like these are particularly special when pedaling uphill or trying to hold pace in flat/level terrain, I actually run the DHR2 out front specifically to make up the braking traction that's otherwise lacking.
As far as how stiff to set things up, to me it was an area that required a bit more negative air chamber volume on the fork to really even things out - not only does the very linear fork and rather non-linear rear works quite well for me as long as the ramp-up is about the same on bigger hits, it lines up extremely well. Sitting on the compression circuits out back actually works surprisingly well for me, and having the back slightly overdamped actually accentuates what this bike excels at - going unreasonably fast on flowy/somewhat technical stuff where you can link thing together and take the odd big hit or send, then go right back to managing turn entry to carry the maximum speed in and out of turns of technical elements.
I'd also agree that this is one sometimes a valid 'only bike' candidate, and would be terrain dependent in that regard. In areas where lots of easy to access trails meet this definition of 'fairly technical, not too steep', then this is a brilliant ride. For trails that you can survive on a hardtail, this layout is an absolute weapon, and why the Fox36 was really the right choice.a
June 3, 2022, 8:22 a.m. - Tehllama42
Neils, thanks for the fantastic review. As my personal rig sits incredibly closely to this one (150mm fork, 127mm rear travel effectively, Horst link), I keep reaching a lot of the same conclusions about what the bike excels with, and the tire selection dependency for something like this ends up being really tricky. MaxxGrip out front becomes basically a requirement for using these bikes to their potential, because using the front center to its potential requires lots of grip, and it's not like these are particularly special when pedaling uphill or trying to hold pace in flat/level terrain, I actually run the DHR2 out front specifically to make up the braking traction that's otherwise lacking. As far as how stiff to set things up, to me it was an area that required a bit more negative air chamber volume on the fork to really even things out - not only does the very linear fork and rather non-linear rear works quite well for me as long as the ramp-up is about the same on bigger hits, it lines up extremely well. Sitting on the compression circuits out back actually works surprisingly well for me, and having the back slightly overdamped actually accentuates what this bike excels at - going unreasonably fast on flowy/somewhat technical stuff where you can link thing together and take the odd big hit or send, then go right back to managing turn entry to carry the maximum speed in and out of turns of technical elements. I'd also agree that this is one sometimes a valid 'only bike' candidate, and would be terrain dependent in that regard. In areas where lots of easy to access trails meet this definition of 'fairly technical, not too steep', then this is a brilliant ride. For trails that you can survive on a hardtail, this layout is an absolute weapon, and why the Fox36 was really the right choice.a