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Interesting no anvl components on the higher end builds.
My deore/mrzocchi spire 3800 peak pandemic market hurts my cheap soul just a bit less now.
Maybe they think hey bigger price means we can offer a bigger discount at the end of the year and for the people who are gonna buy a new 4 year old bike maybe they aren’t too worried about value to begin with.
Aluminum frame at 2600 is a bit scary. Hope that doesn’t become the norm for the more premium brands.
AXS and Di2 batteries weigh ~25g; I struggle to imagine a scenario in which reducing that weight makes any kind of measurable, real-world difference in performance.
I was totally unaware of that, thank you very much for sharing. Vitalmtb forum delivering the goods, as always.
The weight difference between a normal derailleur and a T-type is definitely in how beefy the T-type is built.. Upside, a single charge on an AXS battery could probably get you through an entire race season..
I think the perceived smoothness of heavier vehicles more comes down to the weight of sprung mass compared to the weight of the rider/driver more than anything. You and your bike a plenty heavy and exert plenty of force in compression to not get bump jumped by even a heavy wheel assuming the suspension and tire pressure is reasonable and of course not wheels that are obscenely heavy. Obviously at some point they would become heavy enough to be an issue. The forces exerted by the suspension are also largely vertical so they do little to take away from horizontal velocity.
Of course it's not very simple, but while you're correct the impact are vertical, the energy lost is still energy lost, and it's no other energy you bring in than kinetic - every time you deflect a part from a straight line, you use energy. So the lighter part you deflect, the less energy.
Now I hear the argument of rider+bike's weight a lot, but that ignores the biggest suspension components we have - arms and legs. The dynamic forces are vastly different from the suspended weight being a solid object, quite the contrary - suspension is essentially trying to calm down your contact points and the little weight you keep on them (hands, feet..), while the rest is suspended again by your limbs.
Getting distracted from rumors(or lack thereof anyways) and all a little bit. But the physics are kind of cool.
For anecdotal evidence, I have 2 very similar bikes in a way, and 2 wheel sets for each. One wheelset is light, one is heavy for going too gnarly. As others mentioned, there's obvious ups and downs to both lighter and heavier, and the handling characteristics ignoring suspension change a lot, I attribute that to the gyro effect of heavier wheel.
They already get swapped between 2 bikes with near identical geometry, similar travel, and different drive trains. Again, this is anecdotal, but when I make a mistake and leave the rear wheel hung up on a square edge, I'd be pretty confident to say the heavier wheel hangs up with more force (as I'd expect) and I get rocked forward more noticeably. Again it's anecdotal, but I also graduated in physics and math and it just adds up to my theory.
Your suspension is doing work on the mass of you and the unsprung mass. Viewing it as doing work to slow down the upward motion of the wheel cuts out the majority of the picture. From a suspension performance standpoint, the argument for lower unsprung mass is the wheel can get returned to the ground quicker after it goes over an obstacle that causes it to lose contact. That is a direct correlation to increased traction. I think rebound is one of the most overlooked things across many industries, but what I was referring to initially was just the compression side of things.
Your arms and legs are exactly why the ratio of rider weight to unsprung mass matters. As the unsprung mass gets larger relative to the rider, less vibrations are passed through to the rider in many scenarios. If you were rigidly affixed to the bike, all that would matter is the total weight of you and the bike combined. While proportionally heavy unsprung mass smooths out vibrations very well, the downside is if it’s going to bottom out you are along for the ride and there’s pretty much nothing you can do about whereas when the unsprung mass is proportionally less you have control over that to a degree via your muscles.
Wheels getting hung up is an interesting one because it has less to do with how the suspension is moving and rather creating a situation where the suspension won’t move. All bikes have a horizontal leverage ratio that sheds light on how it will handle larger square edge hits. I bike with a rearward axle path has a positive horizontal leverage ratio whereas when the axle path is forward it’s negative. This is what causes shock tuners to see lower average shaft speeds with a rearward axle path bike even if it has the same vertical leverage ratio. A heavier wheel is also essentially creating a bigger boat anchor to try and pull over the obstacle, which will always require more force. If you increased unsprung mass, conservation of moment would dictate that you’d notice any hang up less.
Smaller, lighter AXS batteries already exist:
The thing about wheels is that they move on the suspension path, but also rotate. Spinning a wheel faster(sprinting) or spinning it slower(braking) results in a slower reaction with a heavier mass. Changing direction right/left left/right is also affected. For those of us not on a clock it may matter zero, but for the time equals money folks it could be a consideration.
Late to the discussion- but I think you'd have to be a pretty good rider doing A-B-A-B testing to feel 250g of unsprung weight on the rear wheel. The unsprung weight on the rear end is probably about 5kg- wheel, tire, brake caliper, cassette, derailleur, chainstay/seatstay, link etc. 250g is a small % change.
Another thing I didn't see any discussion about is the fact that the tire is kind of suspension for the wheel. A heavier wheel might make the tire work harder and filter out some vibration before it can even get to the axle. Think about a 10kg wheel- might filter out all the high frequency vibration because the tire can't move it at that frequency.
The sprung/un-sprung discussion is mostly academic anyway- you have to run good tires and wheels/brakes/drivetrain for your application. The weight is what it is- might save a few hundred grams by throwing money at it, but it's not going to be a big change either way.
Thanks for chiming in, Dave. I think you described my impressions perfectly, I have a light wheelset with light tires and a heavy wheelset with heavy tires and the light tires feel worse in every way over bumps and chatter. I feel like I'm getting kicked around a lot more, and with the heavier wheels I'm tracking so much better and the ride is so much smoother.
Now, of course the performance of the tires themselves is different, so I suppose the real test would be to glue lead weights onto my light wheels with lights tires and see how they feel. But I wouldn't be surprised if they felt better with weight. I think added upsprung weight helps push more force through the tire, using the tire as a spring before the force ever reaches the chassis.
That's my reverse engineering, anyone, from my ride observations. Would be fun to test.
Anvl is dead. They have a stupid over stock on there stuff so it’ll be selling for a while but it’s gone
Think the xc racers have been using them for a couple of years now (or they did for a gimmick or weight reduction posturing)
My regular sized battery lasts a month riding 3 times a week - despite what the e-shifting haters claim about “having to charge every ride” so no risk of a 1.5 hour xc race or an entire DH race week posing an issue for the smaller version.
I'd be willing to bet that smaller battery could get a couple of DH race weeks out of a single charge..
Try putting light tires on heavier wheelset.. Or here's taking it a to testing level.. Light tires, heavy wheels vs heavy tires with light wheels but try to get the weights close to each other. At point, my thoughts are that tires will play a bigger role in the handling and feel than the overall weight of the wheels..
They surely do. It's the sidewall support on heavier tires you'll notice most
That's my thought.. Robot touched on that a bit and as Dave said, the tires are in themselves a bit of suspension. I only jumped on the heavier tire thing a little over a year ago.. I noticed a difference in cornering right away..
Yeah this was going to be by next point - heavier wheels can make the tyre stick to the ground better (to a point) so isn't guaranteed to be a negative thing. Plus like you say, heavier wheels normally bring more performance gain realative to the weight change. I've always felt most people could easily "sacrifice" a kg or 2 over the whole bike and gain a MASSIVE amount of performance and/or reliability with zero drawbacks but its hard to convince riders of that.....
Neko Mullaly did a video exactly on this a few years ago, I believe it was something like -
"heavy"/aggressive set up , eg dh tyres and coil suspension - this was fastest
"light" set up - slower
"light" set up with weight added to make it the same is the heavy bike - barely any change in speed, maybe even fractionally faster? It was done well enough that the results were quite relevant IMO
But Rulezman says.....🤣
The other tricky thing with tires is there’s always the question of what pressure and how stiff of a tire do you need. If you just needed to crush 12 mm tall chatter then low pressure, flexible tire, and super heavy wheel would be very smooth. But then it falls apart as you hit anything bigger. I know I certainly end up somewhere in the middle where it’s a little chattery on the really high frequency stuff but then I’ll pinch the sidewall hitting something taller. Not something that can be won on all fronts. The lack of sidewall height on bike tires kind of limits how much they can influence suspension tuning compared to other vehicles. With an off road race truck you pretty much don’t have to worry about tuning the shocks for small bump because the tires can eat a 10” tall bump if they have to.
It depends if your racing or not really. A lot of people set up their bikes for comfort on their regular trails.
If your racing you just want to maximise cornering speed, so if it rattles your teeth out over some rocky chatter, just hold on as it worth it to exit the corner faster and save 0.5s on the next straight. Obviously have it high enough to not wreck a rim or pinch flat on the way down.
Remember when Neko made his carbon rear end to the DH bike, and was hopeful it would improve suspension performance because of the lower sprung mass, even he was like, yeah I can't feel a difference. But the rear end did provide other benefits.
toobular stuff with kavenz - https://www.vitalmtb.com/forums/hub/wound-carbon-tubes-vs-aluminum-kave…
My favorite thing is his says “the best or nothing” and he rides a banshee lmaooo
All this talk about smaller batteries to reduce unsprung mass on the rear end of a DH bike is interesting, but I kind of chuckle when I remember within the last year there were World Cup racers were janking together auto water dripping setup thingys to their bikes to cool their brakes.
On the Raaw E-Bike topic: This is quite interesting...
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/hepha-gmbh-ebike_hepha-raaw-hephaxraaw-activity-7397144203723673600-hPgN
still one of the few frames with proper geo
I believe the two "oldest" bikes on the market right now are S Enduro (2020) and Banshee Titan (2019) and they are both still perfectly relevant going into 2026...
I'd say Titan became even more popular as the time went by which is pretty funny in modern times but I'd say there are more and more of us who dont really buy into latest trends of blingbling marginal gains and are perfectly happy with a simple, capable, reliable and affordable bike and Banshee ticks all of those.
Even after riding the very best enduro bikes from Yeti, Transition, and Santa Cruz, the Specialized Enduro remains highly competitive. The geometry and ride are still fantastic, with the long seat tube on the S3 size being the only real limitation, as it restricts dropper post travel to 170 mm.
Quarter HP just did a revisit on the Titan, and seat post insertion was one of the knocks on a six year old frame.. Considering that 170 was long at that point, that's not bad..
I have had Classified hubs in for evaluation in 142 and 148mm applications.
All that extra mass hanging off the rear wheel would suck, just like any other IGH. Also, the shifting isn’t exactly…. reliable.