Whether you encounter smooth climbs regularly is going to be fairly region-dependent, and there are plenty of places where rocky or rooted climbs are the norm not smooth fire roads. You clearly see the value in active suspension on not smooth climbs though, so no sense beating a dead horse. I think depending on your riding or racing terrain, a suspension lockout may add a lot of value or very little, and what we’re probably seeing here are some differences shaking out based on what is commonplace terrain-wise where different users are riding and racing regularly.
It’s interesting you mentioned Nate riding Live Valve and Brain-equipped bikes. Jonathan, who is rather discerning about suspension, I’m pretty sure rides or at least has ridden XCO without a remote lockout. He was on the MRP Ribbon SL last year, which only has a manual LSC adjustment (I have the same fork), and the SB100 doesn’t have a remote shock lockout either to my knowledge. I’m guessing he wouldn’t have been manually flipping the switches during an XCO race, although I certainly could be wrong.
To be clear, I’m not trying to hate on remote lockouts. I know there are cases where they’re useful. I just think that maybe there’s more case by case utility for them rather than a blanket necessity for them in XC racing, and none of us are racing WC XCO courses (I don’t think), so what the pros do may or may not be entirely relevant to our races, leaving out the fact that there are also clearly skill and fitness differences as well.
My multiple paragraphs of babbling probably boil down to: different strokes for different folks.
The issue with responding to one person is that another person will cherry pick a comment and then do a long write up that kind of gets off the point. I was responding to the “dogma” line of thinking and I pointed out that Nate who is the CEO of the company is obviously using compression damping. I bet there is an employee at TR that races a fat bike in XC races and someone will come along and point that out to prove a point. I get it.
Per Jonathan, I don’t disagree. I’m not saying that every rider has to use a lock out. I’m not saying every bike comes with a lockout. I’m not saying you should ride around with your bike locked out all the time.
I am saying that there are situations where a suspension will work against you by absorbing energy and giving you nothing back in return. A lockout is helpful in preventing that, or minimizing that, for riders that are interested in doing so.
If you aren’t interested in doing so then great but again, it doesn’t change the reality of what a suspension does.
Here is an abstract of a white paper that deals with the loss of energy from suspension and how there is an attempt to regenerate that energy back into the vehicle. When you think about that, it is very similar to regenerative braking that is starting to show up in EV’s. Why? Energy is wasted and if that energy can be translated back into kinetic energy then everyone wins.
Abstract—Vehicle is a very important part of human life. It
makes transportation easy. Although there have been many
inventions and on-going researches on increasing engine
efficiency, there exist other opportunities to increase the comprehensive performance of vehicles. In application, various losses occur in different sections of the vehicle. They can be
identified as frictional losses, losses due to air drag, losses due to
vibrations, thermal losses, etc. One of the losses is the dissipation of energy by the shock absorber or suspension of a vehicle. Moving vehicles can expend a significant amount of energy in undesirable vertical motions that are induced by road bumps and much of that is dissipated in conventional shock absorbers as they dampen the vertical motions. This paper relates to an
energy recovery model, more particularly, to an apparatus that
uses the kinetic energy of automobile suspension and stores it in
the form of electrical energy.
CONCLUSION The study shows that it is practical to extract energy from the movement of shock absorbers, which otherwise was just lost in the form of heat.
We can get back on topic for the purpose of discussing XC bikes. I think I’ve provided more than enough science and information to be helpful to people that may not be familiar with what a suspension does to shine a light on very specific reasons as to why lockouts exist.
If you don’t want to run one then don’t run one. It is your choice to make the decision that the loss in energy is not important enough to you to run a lockout. It does not mean that energy loss does not exist.
Thought I would jump in with my N=1 observations after just switching from an older Epic to the new 2021 Epic EVO. My XC racing days are behind me and have been nursing some injuries over the past couple years, so figured I would try something a little more forgiving and was curious if the new geometry would help a competent but by no means great technical rider. First few rides were a mixed bag, as bike definitely handles differently, but once I adjusted I was loving it. The crazy thing is I have been setting PRs on strava trail segments despite being 40 watts off my prime FTP and riding a bike that weighs 3lbs more. The sections have been between 5 and 10 minutes in duration and have been on rolling terrain with short punchy climbs but no sustained climbing. Two things likely factor into the improvement - the slacker geometry and better suspension. Both allow you to relax and roll through the rough stuff so much smoother, and smoother generally means faster. In my opinion we probably overestimate efficiency losses to suspension and underestimate gains from riding a section smoother (less bouncing around). Having said that, nothing bugs me more than an active suspension on a flat road or climb so if the race involved lots of either I would consider a remote lockout. I think specialized has done a great job with the compression tuning on the EVO’s rear shock though so am using the lockout far less than I expected. As others have said, this is all very course/terrain and rider dependent so everyone has to figure out what works best for them.
Good post thank you and congrats on the new bike. For those flat road climbs, imagine if you had a button you could push to engage your suspension when you wanted it and turn it off when you didn’t
In laymen’s terms, I absolutely love my remote lockout! Coming from a 150/140 “all mountain” and a 100mm hardtail to a single Scott Spark that does what both of those bikes do. The lockout with great geometry and suspension has made my rides much more enjoyable and faster.
I noticed on a climb this morning, I had the lockout set in the middle trail mode and then I locked it out on the climb and I jumped 1.5 mph with the same effort.
Of course this is “bro science” but it’s noticeable. New bike and 8 weeks of TR and I PR’ed my 15 mile loop by 18 minutes!
Our local trails do tend to have a lot of roots, rocks, etc, so on my Supercaliber I’m finding I’m leaving the suspension unlocked the majority of the time.
However there are definitely times I still like to lock it. We have one trail that the major climb is a series of tight, steep switchbacks. The terrain is fairly smooth here. As I approach each tight switchback, I usually stand and hammer hard as I make it up and around. The lockout really helps me power up them and this is where the stiff rear end of the locked out Supercaliber really does feel like a hard tail with little to no lateral flex.
I’ve been riding my Checkpoint on gravel rides for the most part this season, but if all systems are go for marathon XC racing next year, I’ll be bringing the Supercaliber on some gravel rides to work on specificity on the bike. I suspect I’ll be using the lock out on the gravel rollers where I tend to stand and surge over.
+1 to this. Im a 2yr Spark owner and whenever there is fire road or non technical climbing the ability to easily lock the bike out is excellent.
However I find the greatest use at the bottom of a short smooth climb where you want a little boost to pass a rider - lock it out, stand up and blast, then click it off and jump into the singletrack.
Collecting the data would be from the AXS electronic dropper, just another data point that’s accessible to everyone who has this expensive electronic gear
Yeah I guess they would have that also. But his lost was about them using a suspension lockout which is what I hadn’t seen any team say they collect that data. Though I would be surprised if they are some how. Even if it’s only on practice runs.
Unless I’m wrong, the shockwiz only plugs into the air side of the suspension so I don’t think it would know that the compression damper is closed but maybe it is able to detect that? I’d be surprised but impressed if it could. But I also haven’t looked into the shockwiz too much as it’s not something I was interested in trying at this point.
I’m late on this but I’ve got one on my Oiz M10 TR & it works quite well. It took me a considerable amount of time to get used to the dropper lever in a different position but it’s second nature now. Initially, I also hit the lockout lever by accident but very rarely now.
I have mine set up to lock only the shock on the first release & then lockout the fork on the second release. I’m much more likely to just lockout the shock than both.
That said, push to unlock sucks. It seems tougher to me to set up when swapping cables than posh tp unlock. Plus, if I have a cable failure, I’d rather have suspension than not.
I’ve been using the Shockwiz for a long time now. As far as I’m aware it doesn’t detect lockouts and therefore when I tune suspension with it I don’t use the lockout so as not to mess up the data. It is a limitation of the Shockwiz since you may end up dialing in more low speed compression than needed to compensate for times you would normally have your suspension locked out. For the most part though I’ve still been able to get very good tunes with it.
Maybe some software wizardry would be able to detect when the lockout is in use, but I haven’t heard that that is on the feature road map at this time.
Good to know. I guess that’s not really the point of the Shockwiz either is it? It’s not really a data collection tool as much as it is to set up and dial in your suspension. It’s not meant to be like a power meter or even to function like how AXS records gear changes. Though I’m sure that’s possible and potentially in the SRAM development timeline.
