Suspension: Dialling it all in with ShockWiz

Are you getting the most from your investment?

You bought a new bike, you got a bike fit, either from the store or spent the extra cash on an independent bike fitter. You have sorted out saddle widths, saddle height, handlebars and stems, and you are now sitting perfectly to pedal for hours, right?

You may have overlooked the most vital part of your bike. It may even be the reason you sold your old one and bought a new one or a host of other upgrades in the search of that magic carpet ride. The suspension.

Suspension tuning leaves most mystified, including some top professionals in the sport who leave everything to their head mechanics to change on their behalf based on feedback from the rider. In some cases, riders are notoriously poor at translating what it is the bike is doing and what they want it to do and just like many everyday riders, they end up ‘riding around the problem’.

While there are many guides on suspension tuning available on the internet, it is going to be up to you to interpret things like Sag, Preload, Rebound, and Compression Damping. Also, awareness of how each of these things affects your bike as well as their influence on each other as you make changes. If you’re not confident with any of these things, you’re going to need professional help.

Mountain bike technology has progressed at warp speed in the last few years and there are so many new choices. It can be very difficult to begin to understand what it is you truly need. Bike manufacturers pair up with component suppliers like Fox and Rockshox to give you a guideline pressure for your bike’s suspension and if you’re lucky, some rebound click information, and off you go…

But what happens if you are not happy with the ballpark sticker guideline? What problems will you feel if your suspension is not set up well?

Generally, poor handling is a consequence of poor suspension setup, a vague feeling of grip or no feel at all. No confidence in the front tyre’s ability to grip or a loss of grip resulting in crashes for no apparent reason. Understeer, oversteer, pogo bouncing over bumps or the other extreme, packing down, even simple things like poor stopping distances are often symptoms of bad suspension tuning.

So, what do you do? Most would head off to their local bike shop (LBS) and ask the local suspension guru (if they have one) and have him set your sag and estimate your rebound and compression settings based on experience. Maybe this took a few trial and error visits and that’s about as far as it went… until now…

Enter the world of the ShockWiz

The ShockWiz is basically a telemetry box that once set up, will measure the air movement in your fork or rear shock and make suggestions (via a smartphone app) for you to adjust the suspension to get your bike perfectly set up for you. You can choose from a variety of tuning modes for eg. Balanced, Playful, and then there is a Custom mode where you can drill down even further to isolate your feel, either based on your bike type, riding style or just personal preference.

The genius behind this product is the vast amounts of world-class data collected from athletes at the top of their game, helping develop answers to the problems all riders face with the handling of their bikes over any number of different terrains.

Why do you need this when the bike manufacturer gave me a guide? They know their bikes best, right?

Wrong. They will make any given bike feel ok for the average person in an average position. But your weight, and your weight distribution over your fork or rear shock, coupled with your skill and ability makes your bike behave differently to anyone else’s. Even two similar people, with same physical attributes, could have different setups on the same fork model on the same bike. You are unique.

Bikes are expensive so changing one is not taken lightly and chasing that dream experience is often left blaming the bike, model or type of suspension parts, and moving on to newer and better with the promise of the holy grail of balance and grip and enjoyment. Before changing an entire bike for poor performance reasons, it should be given a proper setup which could save you thousands in misappropriated funds and misdirected blame.

How does ShockWiz help you?

Advanced riders can help themselves via the App and novice riders could use it in conjunction with their LBS guru, to achieve the best result for them. Translating how you feel on the bike, what it is doing or not doing to your satisfaction should be interpreted by a good suspension tuner and positive adjustments can be made to your bike until you are feeling at one with your machine.

Here are some screenshots of a typical setup process and what’s reported via the Quarq ShockWix App:

The ShockWiz App welcoming screen.

The suggestions screen is where the most vital information is shown.

Welcome screen shows chosen tune mode in red, as well as current air pressure and amount of sag in real time, in the grey blocks. The green shock tuning score bar rates how good your current setup is out of 100, and the Confidence percentage rates how confident the ShockWiz is that it’s collected enough data to give you fair setup advice. Bottom right is calibration status – this is done on installation to calibrate the stroke rate of your fork or rear shock and differs from unit to unit so it’s vitally important to first get this right. There is a calibration wizard to guide you through all of that.

This will be the screen most will reference unless you’re having serious issues like packing down. Initially, the baseline pressure will be most important as that controls other factors as well. Air Spring ramp is one your mechanic will most likely need to help you out with, requiring tokens to modify. Then there’s the rebound clicker (red knob) and compression (usually black and blue adjusters).

More serious problems like Pogo and Packing are displayed on the Detections screen, meanwhile, the Statistics page will keep the more aggressive riders interested in numbers while airborne!

The Detections screen shows more serious problems.

Hang time!

There is a lot of info that, in the right hands can make a serious difference to your riding, crash less and go faster, develop better skills with more confidence and remain injury free because of it!