Anyone do the Southern XC race at Pippingford on Sunday?

Rode the big drop offs and my forks bottomed out every time.
They are SID Team 100mm.

Is it my forks or poor technique?
They are setup for my weight 70Kg.

Run up to the first drop off was tricky climb and couldn’t ride all the way up after the first lap due to the mud. So had to ride off with only one foot clipped in. Quite scary.

my forks bottomed out every time.

They are setup for my weight.

Those 2 are not mutually exclusive. More air required. Nothing wrong with the forks, they’re an XC fork!

setup is not just about the riders weight, but also about the riders style and the riders location.

What may work for you on one course may not work on a different course, as you have found out.

I did the fun race so luckily just drizzle! The compression at the bottom of that drop was quite hard but you want your forks to use all their travel a couple of times on a ride/lap, god i wish my old rebas would use more than 75% of their travel which they dont regardless of what air I put in them (although they will use it all with 0psi but thats not much use).

Maybe chuck a bit more air in them next time as most race courses will have a few bits like that whereas your normal xc loops may not

There are a couple of vides here btw http://www.xcracer.com/forum/viewtopic.php?id=5229

Rode the big drop offs and my forks bottomed out every time.

in a bad way or just a gentle ‘there’s no more, sorry’ kind of thing?

as above, using full travel is seen as a good thing and if it’s somethign beyond what you’d normally do then either accept it or pump a few extra psi in for gnarly stuff.

you want your forks to use all their travel a couple of times on a ride/lap

How do you figure that?

By that logic I’d put less air and compression damping in my forks to ride down the canal towpath than a DH track?

By that logic I’d put less air and compression damping in my forks to ride down the canal towpath than a DH track?

if you wanted to get the benefits of suspension then yes, but on the canal towpath you accept a compromise in favour of pedalling efficiency (or just think ‘that’ll do’ based on whatever seems to be a gernally good compromise for your overall ridign style/terrain).

I never change my pressures, I recently put a bit more in (in line with the Trek guide they’ve recently published) and it felt horrible, I never got more than about 60mm on a 4 hour Surrey Hills ride, so I took some out again!

I tend to finish every ride having achieved maximum travel, but could very rarely tell you where I’ve managed it, which strikes me as the perfect balance. If I was getting a harsh ‘bottom out’, which I assume you were on Sunday, I’d definitely be putting more air in!

Your forks should bottom out a couple of times on a ride/race. Nothing to worry about.

A DH racer I sometimes ride with told me if he doesn’t bottom out his forks on a practice run, he keeps dropping the pressure till they do. The same logic can be applied to XC, though most people set and forget.

if you wanted to get the benefits of suspension then yes……..

I’d say the benifit of suspension is that it let’s me ride faster when correctly set up

If I wanted the benifits of suspension arround a trail center that’s going to involve a bit more air and damping than a lap of somewhere more rocky. Yes idealy if the track was consistently technical all the way round then the ideal setting would be the one where the suspension was used fully, all the time, but setting it up to cope with one isolated feature on a trail isn’t nececeraly the fastest setting, it might be faster to set the forks up to cope with the rest of the track then lose a couple of seconds on the drop by rolling it (or accepting that the forks bottoming out).

Sounds like my air pressure is about right then. It wasn’t a hard whack just a fairly gentle knock.

Cheers

Try a bit more, it may improve things everywhere. It’ll take all of 10 seconds!