How to choose a full suspension mountain bike
Fed up of reading dozens of catalogues and their sales jargon to find your ideal bike? Use our Full Suspension Experience Chart as your research tool instead. To be honest, it’s a revamp of something Specialized produced for those attending their Specialized Bicycle Components University (SBCU: a week of riding in California, bummer eh?).
Now, there's loads of full suspension bikes on the market from dozens of manufacturers, but they are all designed with a rider in mind. Each rider’s style is assigned a category at the development stage; it’s these categories we’ve dissected. It comes down to what you want from your full sus rig – the experience you want to have on the mountain.
Want to ride your favourite loop in 2 minutes faster than your previous PB? Ok, then speed is obviously
your main criteria. If fun (shits & giggles as they say in CA), gnarly, slopping, single track is more your bag then it’s more travel for you, my friend. Basically, you need to ask yourself two questions:
1) how important is my speed when I ride uphill?
2) how important is my speed downhill?
Then express these as a ratio e.g. 20/80 makes you a pretty hard-core downhill rider.
Personally, I hate to be the last man to the top. I’m rarely first (especially if I ride with Chris) but I push myself to be as close as I can to his rear tyre – I want my muscles and lungs to know they’re on the bike.
That means I’d like less travel and wasted energy – more hard-tail than full suspension. However, I also want to be able to hit stuff on the way down without being kicked off (I’m not that great at picking my lines, so most rocks/roots get touched in some way). Full suspension is obviously far better here than a hard-tail. Overall then, I don’t want to be handicapped in any particular area on the mountain - all round speed and efficiency (of pedalling) is my goal. Therefore, my ratio of priority (% up versus % down) is about 50/50.
Simon, on the other hand, has duff knees and doesn’t give a damn about being first to the top – “you’ll all wait for me anyway, right”. He gets his grins from coming down and riding ‘through’ things with his
6” travel Kona Coiler. This much travel isn’t the most on the market, but it really does mean you can pick some crazy lines to overtake people
where you’d never usually put your rubber. His ratio is about 10/90 but he has to ride his bike up the mountain (granted, rather slowly), so that brings it back to more like 40/60. Remember, you’ve also got flat bits in which you need to pedal.
Okay then, our chart works like this:
1) weight up your priorities as a ratio
2) find which category you sit in
3) research the MTBs in that category
4) research some more
5) spoil yourself & grin wildly
