The History Of High-Pivot Mountain Bikes
cannondale jekyll gt force trek session norco range da vinci spartan forbidden dreadnought all of these recently released bikes have come out with a high pivot suspension design now it may seem like this is the latest fad but in fact that design has been around since the early 90s so why has it come back and is it here to stay or is it all just high pivot hype all full suspension mountain bikes have a main pivot now this is just a virtual point that the rear wheel will rotate around when it sinks into its suspension most full suspension bikes have a low pivot centered around about the bottom bracket but this a high pivot bike has a virtual pivot point that is much higher hence the name having a high pivot point means that these two points the rear axle and the bottom bracket have a much more accentuated or exaggerated movement hence we talk about high pivot bikes having a rearward axle path now this extreme movement gives the high pivot both its benefits and its disadvantages now the benefit of a rearward axle path means that when you're descending down rough terrain the bike will get less hung up on big hits so the theory goes that it'll be a smoother ride but also a faster ride as all of those little bumps aren't slowing you down now cannondale believed in this design way back in the early 90s they brought out the super v in 1993 and it stuck around for about three years before they axed it due to those odd riding characteristics now the problem with a rearward axle path is that as the cassette moves backwards it will pull the chain and therefore pull on the cranks and that's what we know as pedal kickback and this can be quite disconcerting especially if it's a force great enough to knock you off your pedals so this is where this has come into play this is known as the idler or the pulley wheel and this effectively reroutes the chain line closer to the main virtual pivot point so you don't get that chain growth so you can effectively tune out pedal kickback and stop those disconcerting features that we saw in the early 90s and it also leaves the suspension to be freed up from any pedaling forces giving you a nice magic carpet ride it's important to reiterate that high pivot point is just referring to that virtual pivot point it's got nothing to do with the linkage system companies can choose a single pivot a split pivot a four bar linkage design and still have that high virtual pivot point even the position of the idler can tune in and tune out different braking and pedaling forces so i think it's fair to say that no high pivot is born the same but how did we get from the cannondale in the early 90s to the bikes of today and why are we seen so many in the last couple of years here's a little history lesson for you the real high pivot development started in the early noughties where the downhill world cup scene was seeing rougher courses less like cross-country grassy descents in 2000 the v process was created specifically with one purpose and that's for nico voughlier to win the world championships on a rough spanish course that was four minutes long sadly nico didn't win that world championships he's one of the few that he didn't win over the course of about a decade but to be fair he did get a puncture although i think it left a bit of a sour taste in his mouth outside of the world cup brooklyn machine works was rising to fame and they got cultural kudos as they were ridden by cool free riders and even begged investment from rapper pharrell williams but outside of the free riding scene these bikes were seriously heavy steel free riders with 24 inch wheels and so outside of free ride in the streets of new york city they didn't really prove to be that popular in 2004 danny hart started his downhill career on the balfour bb7 named that because the pivot point was a whopping seven inches above the bottom bracket we also saw the mysterious honda rn01 with that secretive gearbox something we later found out to be more like a derailer and a cassette hidden away and it was a probably an attempt to correct the chain line much like the idler of today now it cost honda hundreds of thousands to make which is probably why it never went into mainstream production also in 2004 louis arrays was starting out the k9 engineering it was a four bar linkage design with a high pivot point and he'd added the idler in there the bike got high praise from the media but it came with a really detailed user manual and needed to be specifically set up for riders so perhaps that put the public off interestingly 14 years later louis is now the brains behind the gt force the gt fury and the cannondale jekyll in 2006 trek brought out the session 10 which was a single pivot high pivot design with the idler pulley now they were copying their former free ride hucker the diesel and they wanted to make a seriously fast downhill bike which i believe they achieved but trek say they moved away from this platform because they wanted to concentrate on a suspension platform that better worked across multiple disciplines and multiple bikes by 2015 we had a number of high pivot designs we had the antidote dark matter a seriously boutique downhill bike we had the ghost dh9000 we had wind masters racing on the bulls wild core and we had the zeroed a quirky internally geared bike with shimano alphine but it was common sound riding addiction team that were playing around with the new common sound supreme dh that i think really changed the game common sounds commitment to that team year on year and commitment to developing that bike year on year is what i really think secured the high pivot design fast forward to 2018 and a relatively unknown french rider ormury pirion bust onto the scene won three world cups in a row and took the overall title and to prove it wasn't a flash in the pan fellow rider miriam nicole took the world championships in 2019 and 2020 and all of a sudden this 29er high pivot bike was the hottest fastest bike on the planet and everyone wanted a piece of the action by 2021 it opened the floodgates to high pivot designs while common sound were developing their supreme dh for the world cup circuit deviate cycles were prototyping an enduro trail bike with the high pivot design so i wanted to speak to ben jones to find out where it all came from and where he thinks it's going okay so ben jones from dv8 cycles tell me why did you choose the high pivot suspension design for your bikes well i i didn't choose anything okay chris did that yeah i had to be super clear here so my business partner chris is the designer of the bikes but i believe that chris um was in new zealand um during a guidance season and he rode a zero g something maybe yeah it was like a g2 or it was the earlier ones yeah yeah it was one of the earlier ones and it was a downhill bike with a gearbox and with a high pivot a very high pivot this thing was this thing was almost on the top tube it was it was super high and he loved the way it rode and you know uh chris is an engineer and he was i think that got him thinking about the best way to design his own body well the two things that came from that is one he really liked the gearbox thought the gearbox had some real uh great advantages um and he really liked the high pivot and how it rode so our first bike the guide had a gearbox and a high pivot well we saw it a lot in the downhill world cup scene throughout the northeast basically and right up to like 2015 2016 which is when you guys were starting to design your dv8 suspension platform um so why do you think we didn't really see any enduro trail bikes um at that time because you were kind of the first of the few to start designing enduro trail high pivots yeah um i mean i think there's a real simple answer to that and that is one by drivetrains right i think the hype of it to perform in a trailing enduro setting um particularly needs an idler and it's extremely hard to design an idler without a one by um front chainring so i think it's that as drivetrains moved on and as we all accepted you know 11 and 12 speed one by systems i think that's given us the ability to kind of execute this this high pivot concept on a trail and endure a bike because in the past one by was a downhill bike right so i think that's why it's been able to make the jump um and there's probably some other factors as well just in terms of what we're able to do on these modern trail bikes and obviously enduro bikes now i mean you know a modern injury bike is nine tenths of downhill bike in terms of its performance downhill so you know i think that's given the the customers or the rider is asking for so much more out of that platform which is where you know we can start experimenting with different suspension concepts that have maybe been a thing in downhill and being successful and downhill we can kind of start to try and bring them into that space you know if you think about it only 10 years ago a um you know a trail bike was basically a burly cross country bike right there was you know maybe 120 mil travel 130 mil travel um you know there was probably other aspects the suspension designers and bike designers were trying to sort out without starting to to go into uh introducing these downhill technology can i even call it technology yeah yeah sure so explain you mentioned the idler and that's kind of where what really changed something so explain why do you need it and why the position's so important the idler allows you to tune the pedal and performance of a high pivot bike effectively that's the the key advantage is the placement idler determines what we call anti-squat which is effectively how how the suspension reacts to pedal forces effectively is what it is uh the other thing that is maybe a little bit more contentious but is this idea of pedal kickback so the idler prevents pedal kickback uh the reason it's a little bit contentious is not because it it doesn't exist it definitely is a concept it's effectively the the chain lengthening um under suspension compression uh the the argument is always about how the free hub comes into that does that kind of take up the slack uh my ver my view is that it and i'm sure there's a correct engineering answer but is that when you place the idler um on the pivot you eliminate that chain growth and you eliminate that pedal kickback which means that pedaling through rough terrain feels like pedaling through flat drain it doesn't either suspension feedback doesn't affect your pedal strokes the whole argument about pedal kickbacks really interesting i mean doddy actually discussed it in a show recently because everyone's talking about it like it's a bad thing and of course you don't want a force to kick you off your pedals you don't want that resistance on a descent but that amount of chain tension does allow you other benefits doesn't it so yeah i mean it's so the chain tension and that growth in the in the chain on a lot of platforms like a non-idler platform is what determines your anti-squat right so and again this is my non-engineers understanding of it um but that is effectively what allows you to allows a suspension designer to in to create a bike that doesn't squat through its suspension as you're pedaling so on a lot of bikes as you put some pedal power down it firms up the shark and you know you can kind of use that um in order to well in order to get an official peddling platform right uh the idler eliminates the connection between those two things so it eliminates the connection between chain growth and anti-squat the anti-squat is controlled in a different way so you can achieve exactly the pedal performance and the characteristics you were saying we might want but without needing the chain tension and the chain growth and that i think is why the platform such a advantage on a trail and enduro bike you know is is because you can do both you can create that really efficient pedaling platform while not having pedal kick back so yes on a lot of bikes you need pedal kickback in order to create the anti-squat on an idler driven high pivot you don't so you disconnect that relationship i think it's fair to say that no high pivot is alike really even if you have the same linkage design even where the idler pulley is positioned can affect it so for example your highlander and your claymore well there they're tuned slightly differently aren't they so explain that to me why are they different and how yeah and it's a really good point so the idler placement determines the anti-squat characteristics of that bike so how that bike pedals so for example on the highlander we went for a slightly higher anti-squat number so when anti-squat is at 100 that means there's effectively no suspension reaction to uh to a peddling force now that does depend on what gear you're in and you know it does depend on quite a lot of things but ultimately around 100 is is no effect above 100 is a slight extension of the shark under pedal forces so with the highlander we chose to go um 130 ish somewhere in the middle of the drivetrain so what that gives you is especially when you're pedaling that ground that is uh you know where you need some traction it effectively extends the shock very slightly as you put in some pedal force uh and it gives it that kind of snappy feel as you as you're pedaling up um technical climbs and stuff on the on the claymore which is designed as very much more of an enduro bike where you're probably spinning up hills um you know you still want it to be able to to be to handle technical climbs but you know most people riding modern enduro could be spinning up fire roads uh we tried to make it quite a lot more neutral so it's closer to that 100 mark um so there's not a huge amount of uh pedal induced suspension uh force if you like force going into the damper from from pedaling high pivots intrinsically have what's called a high anti-rise so there is a little bit of suspension compression i.e you will squat into the travel under rear braking and it will firm up that rear suspension as you break it um is it a good or a bad thing um the instincts it's very easy to be like well any firming up any compression of the suspension from a braking force must be a bad thing my um feelings that it's not so much of a bad thing um especially with the way that um modern races are racing uh breaking hard into corners so imagine if you're breaking hard into a corner what's gonna happen you wait to go over the front the weights go compress the fork you know you need a slack head angle to counter that but what you're getting on these high pivots on the on with this high anti-rise is you're getting a corresponding compression of the suspension which holds the geometry uh it holds the wheelbase of the bike and it gives you an awful amount of stability when you need it when you're braking hard is the rear suspension a little bit stiffer probably does it seem to affect anyone that's winning world cups and these hype events no uh it really it seems as though it's only doing good things for them so i think it comes down to riding style um it's certainly not any slower i don't think there's any doubt at this stage that a high anti-rise makes you slower it doesn't um you know is it does that kind of suspension performance if you like or does that kind of suspension um characteristics suit everyone maybe not um i think it suits aggressive riders i think that that kind of kinematic um suits aggressive riders i think it's hard to argue with the results that that we're seeing from high pivot point platforms across uh enduro and downhill at least right in the last two years it seems every man in his dogs brought out a high pivot design you've got trek da vinci norco cannondale gt why is everyone now bringing one out do you think because it works not that you're biased it does i mean if it didn't work you know everyone's developing high pivots now listen maybe it's a better bandwagon thing i mean you know i think i think the bigger brands have seen the success of maybe some smaller brands uh in the hype of its base and decided to get in on the action so there's definitely an element of that um but it works it works at the highest level um you know they win downhill races so do you think there's any future uh thoughts with the high pivot is it the future is everyone gonna have a high pivot are we gonna see high pivots on anything else i don't think you guys see them on cross-country race bikes you're not going to see them on road bikes um yeah the weight penalty of the kind of infrastructure that goes into it is probably not appropriate i think a high pivot would sue an e-bike it makes a lot of sense for an e-bike uh i think you'll see some e-bikes with high pivots um i will neither confirm or not if we are working on one certainly i think it would suit all i'll say is i think it would suit the high pivot platform i think an e-bike and a high pivot would work really well but there's certainly some engineering challenges that need to be overcome first trying to argue that high pivot is better than low pivot is like trying to argue that any suspension platform is better than another it comes down to rider preference but what do you guys think do you think it's all high pivot hype or are they here to stay let us know down in the comments below and join the debate and we'll see you again soon
2022-08-24 07:02
