Just to add to the general flex debate, back in our DH days I once swapped bikes with my mate on a favourite section of trail a few years ago. He was running some spindly twin crown Marzocchi things, and when I hit some off camber stuff that I knew like the back of my hand, the fork flex – as much as this sounds like pure hyperbole – actually threw me off line and I fell off.
I weighted the front end and turned the bars and the wheel didn’t go with them.
That was in about 2002. In fact my mate still has the bike, and to this day we’ll nip down his cellar occasionally and watch as the wheel slowly turns left to right, steadily catching up with all the steering inputs asked of it nearly a decade ago.
That last sentence isn’t true. The rest was. I’ve had 30 year old Land Rovers with tighter steering than that bloody thing.
Has to be said though – at the time it never held him back. He is and always was faster than I, so it’s really all in the mind. You can accommodate extra flex pretty quickly I reckon.
