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https://www.sram.com/en/rockshox/collections/flight-attendant
The cleverness comes at a cost: FlightAttendant-equipped bikes will initially cost $11,000+.
FlightAttendant-equipped bikes probably won’t be available to buy for some months, but RockShox will unveil the system on Tuesday. Bike journalists have likely been sent an advance press release from RockShox on the new system, and they will have probably promised not to breach the October 5 embargo. I have not been sent that press release.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2021/10/02/ride-faster-smoothe…
The Super Deluxe already has the new aircan shape, same as the one with the hydraulic bottom out control and high speed compression settings has.
EDIT: went through the service manuals to see if the Flight Attendant stuff has been published yet. Nay on that, but the new forks are featured in the tokens and oil quantity tables: https://www.sram.com/globalassets/document-hierarchy/service-manuals/ro…
The interesting bit is this for the lowers: "Maxima PLUSH Dynamic Suspension Lube"
This goes along with the rest of the chassis changes that are also outlined in the Vital article. Same 3wt oil for the damper though.
I wonder when the new analogue stuff will be dropping. It has been possible to see the new Super Deluxe in the wild as well
https://www.sram.com/en/rockshox/models/rs-sdlx-ufa-c1
Buttttt....nope. Profits first.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CUp0aJpMI-_/
https://wheelbased.com/2021/10/04/integrated-active-valve-assembly-by-fox/
The product page has some nice photos too and there's a service manual posted now for all three forks. The shows the way buttercups are executed, new airsprings (backup rings now present in the piston, the circlip on the 35 mm forks is different now), there's more oil in the lowers, sram butter AND oil in the airpspring, etc.
Motorsport analogy, this is spec series (formula 2) vs. constructors series (formula 1).
At the end of the day, this is not the game changer it might seem. I do not use lockout at all and don't miss using it and wouldn't (didn't) use it in any races.
As for data acquisition, there isn't enough money for it in the sport to do it seriously, engineers analysing the data are too expensive even for most factory teams (they would be more expensive than a lot of the top riders given the options for work they have).
However, for displines like downhill and enduro I don't think current suspension telemetry is so good that the advantage gained by factory teams vs privateers would be that huge. Perhaps for tracks like Cairns or Pietermaritzburg there could be a second gained but probably none on tracks like Schladming and Val di Sole.
%100 different than my lyrik
in terms of racing, i certainly get where your coming from where the bike is doing something automatically being an enhancement. it'd be cool to see some testing to see if it would actually provide any benefits on the clock. it would have to be conducted as a controlled blind test - same trail, several riders, and several identical bikes equipped with and without axs suspension. you might need a really loud hub or something to prevent the rider from hearing whether or not the bike they were riding had the axs.
the better riders are still gonna win even without this stuff. We’re talking marginal gains on a pedal intensive DH track or a long enduro stage.
Pidcock didn’t win the Olympics because of his suntour electronic suspension… or did he?
Also if you look at the beigebike tests about time gained from riding a fire road with suspension open/closed, it’s like maybe a 1% difference, if that…
We haven't ridden it yet, so it's hard to judge, but yeah, I doubt this will be a be all, end all solution to enduro racing. Bruni's supposed lockout is taking it to the extreme, as DH is soooooo much more squeezed when it comes to timing, they take out everything they can even with line choice. Enduro, being raced half blind, is a bit more sloppy so there are likely more mistakes and the variation in riding can be higher. So finding the marginal gains is less important if you ask me.
Why are riders running bikes that are, for all intents and purposes, too small in Enduro? My theory (thought up today) is that they are more nimble that way and can adapt to line changes and do things 'on the fly' more easily than with a bigger bike. On the other hand, as the line choice is not as defined as it is with DH, high speed stability might not be as useful as it is with DH. Lockouts go hand in hand with that if you ask me.
As for switches and them being banned in XC... yeah, it's electronic, it's adaptive, it has sensors, but where does Spec's Brain come in? Mercedes had something similar in F1 (FRIC - supposedly adaptive suspension done with moveable weights), but it was banned. And using spec components in series like F1 is mostly done to lower costs, not because they wouldn't want them the best. And with that it's not the parts themselves that are the issue, making them is cheap. It's the development and optimisation that costs time and money, as a lot of very big foreheaded people spend a lot of time making it work juuuuuust right. Data acquisition in DH would fall in this category in general, but like I mentioned, there isn't enough money in MTB for that. That and most riders in the top 80 also aren't at a level, where they would need that - just having a factory ride would do wonders for a lot, let alone everything else before we get to data acquisition.