I realized almost immediately that I had overcooked and overjumped, and that I would pay. It really wasn't much of a jump - a tabletop, about nine feet long, with a two-foot, steeply curved front to it. On a track, you'd hardly pay a moment's notice to it. Unfortunately, I wasn't on a track - I was at the Vulture's Knob mountain bike race course, and this was an unusual jump. To begin with, it wasn't much wider than a single bike; to make it worse, there was very little slope on the back, and a big rut where I was scheduled to land. My front wheel was down, in trail-jumping style, and it was headed directly for the rut. This was, dear readers, very likely to hurt quite a bit.
My front wheel touched down and slipped into the rut. In the next half-second, my Marzocchi Bomber Z1 CR compressed more than four inches, steadily absorbing my landing weight and transfering it slowly (in physics time, not sit-around-on-the-couch time) to the front wheel, which stabilized and dug into the rut. My back wheel landed with virtually no weight on it and therefore found its way with little difficulty. The Bomber began to rebound, leveling the bike out and shoving my center of gravity back over the the pedals. I can't believe it. I didn't wreck. I continued on my merry way. It was that simple. I was so tensed-up, preparing for the wreck, that I almost fell off afterwards, but a few seconds later the full truth came to me. I had been saved by a "dork fork"!
Of course, the Bomber Z1, which is perhaps the strongest single-crown suspension fork out there, and certainly one of the heaviest and most expensive, isn't exactly a "dork fork" as we know them. Nor are these forks terribly rare in the mountain biking community - in fact dual-suspension bikes are now the norm, even among people who never point their bikes downhill. Suspension seatposts and Softride beams are also rather popular with touring riders, who certainly never leave the ground on their bikes, at least not willingly. Even the roadies have made room in their little club for the occasional front-suspension ride, and people who do ride road with a suspension fork are usually very positive about their experiences. The concept of suspension has taken root nearly everywhere in cycling - except, of course, for BMX. Why? To understand that, we'll need to suffer through another one of Boswell's Boring History Lessons...
As most of you know by now, BMX has its roots in kids imitating motocross racers - so it comes as no surprise that many of the early BMX bikes, including the infamous Yamaha Moto-Bike, had front and/or rear suspension. The idea of suspension was certainly valid back in those days, because most of the original BMX tracks were rather rough affairs, narrow, twisting, and full of ruts and rocks. A properly functioning suspension really helps in those situations because it both insulates the rider from shock and keeps the rear wheel on the ground where it can accelerate the bike. That being said, 95% of those old "shockers" were simply not up to the task. Worse yet, they were heavy and fragile - so when tracks got better and speeds increased, they were no longer competitive with conventional bikes. By 1979, any kind of suspension on a BMX bike was considered ridiculous.
The Eighties saw the rise of mountain biking, and with that rise came a furious effort on the part of many manufacturers to engineer decent suspension for MTBs. Some manufacturers, including "Rock Shox", believed a suspension fork was the best way to go; others, including Canondale and Klein, developed rear-suspension bikes designed to be used with a rigid front fork. A small cadre of West Coast garage companies attempted to reinvent the Yamaha Moto-Bike in 26" wheel size for the high-speed downhills of the Pacific Northwest. Most of this stuff was junk; some of it was downright dangerous, as riders who broke their RockShox on downhills could attest.
Tech time. The original BMX suspension bikes had big metal springs over small motocross-style damping shocks, and some of the first suspended mountain bikes did as well, but the industry learned very quickly that elastomers were the way to go for cost and weight. An elastomer is a spongy piece of rubber/plastic/whatever. Why would you need one? Well, to have true suspension you need both the "spring" and the "shock". Imagine you are in a car. You drive over a speed bump. When the wheels hit the bump, they move up. The spring in the suspension compresses as the wheels move, and the shock helps slow things down by absorbing additional force. When the wheel rolls over the bump, the spring pushes the wheel down, and the shock controls how fast the spring moves. Without springs, a car would collapse; without shocks, the car would bounce along like a lowrider at a hopping contest. The early BMX bikes were a lot like lowriders at hopping contests, because they all had lousy shocks.
Most shocks are complicated affairs (you can see a diagram of one in any high-school auto shop manual) but the elastomer is very simple. It's just like squeezing an exercise ball. It's very light, since it's just a tube of polyurethane. It wears out pretty quickly, but the manufacturers figured that would make people buy replacement elastomers, which are a profitable item to sell. So, before you could say "Free Money", elastomer suspension had taken over the world.
That brings us to Answer, makers of the ProForx for BMX. Answer decided to copy the RockShox design and sell BMX forks that used small springs and elastomer dampers. Even the most expensive shocks of this type had less than three inches of travel in those days, but Answer figured BMX riders would be satisfied with a little more than an inch of travel. The ProForx were very heavy, very expensive, and, like all elastomer forks, they, um... hey, BMX parents, am I allowed to use the "s%@ked" word in this column? Let's just say they weren't very good.
Naturally, the combination of heavy, pricey, and junky was wildly popular in the sport, just as it always is. Riders everywhere couldn't wait to bolt their new ProForx on and experience the joys of suspension. Then, five days later, when the elastomers had died, they had a three-pound fork with a pair of randomly bouncing springs in it.
A black-market kit to replace the springs and elastomer with a piece of metal, making the forks non-suspended, circulated quickly around the Pro ranks, permitting them to continue receiving Answer's sponsorship money without having to use the suspension "feature". The word got out that the forks weren't any good, and two years later they were all gone, relegated to people's basements. That was the end of suspension in BMX... or was it?
Marzocchi, an Italian manufacturer of motorcycle suspension, had a better idea about MTB and BMX forks - use real air/oil damping, just like a motorcycle. It would be heavy, but it would be durable and useful. They tested the waters by releasing a pair of 24" forks, which found enthusiastic acceptance... and, right around then, BMX officially "died", scaring Marzocchi off and permitting them to concentrate on mountain bikes. More importantly, even though BMX riders tend to be easily led, product-wise, they are models of discernment and taste compared to the average mountain biker, who will buy three of anything, giving companies plenty of time and money to perfect their products. The "word" was out in BMX that suspension was no good, and once the "word" gets out it's hard to fight it. Meanwhile, after a couple of false starts and product breakages, Marzocchi's "Bomber" fork became perhaps the most important product in the MTB world - a fork that looked great, worked as advertised, and lasted forever. Other manufacturers rushed to copy the Bomber, but it was too late. Marzocchi had changed the MTB world, and was sitting precisely atop it.
The Nineties saw a technological explosion of suspension in mountain biking. Manufacturers such as Klein realized that the brittle but light aluminum frame and the heavy but supple suspension fork made perfect partners. The low weight of the frame made it possible to run a heavy fork, and the heavy fork absorbed the shock from impacts, protecting the frame. Well, it protected the front of the frame, anyway - MTB riders have become very accustomed to snapping their seat stays, chainstays, and seat tubes. Meanwhile, BMX riders were snapping the head tubes off their alumino-scoots at a steadily increasing rate... but that's another story.
My experience with MTB suspension goes like this: I didn't have any until 1997, when I bought a bike with RockShox Indys, which were a genuine improvement over a rigid fork for downhills and rough terrain. Over the course of three years, I blew out dampers, damaged springs, and eventually bent the steerer tube on those forks - but I was saving up for "Zokes" all the time, and last year I installed a set of Marzocchi's finest single-crown Bombers on my bike.
What a difference. I can turn during downhills. I don't get pitched over the bars all the time. I can jump on rough terrain without getting killed. I don't even mind the fact that the forks weigh five freakin' pounds - the other benefits make it more than worthwhile. The difference between ProForx and a Bomber is like the difference between the Wright Brothers' plane and an F-22. And the more happy times my Bomber and I have together, the more I ask myself, "Is there room for this kind of product in racing?"
The answer to that question is one of those "yes and no" things. Modern BMX tracks are much smoother than their ancestors, and they aren't very long. Furthermore, even the best suspension forks tend to "bob" a little bit during hard pedaling - not a useful characteristic for BMX. Some fork-makers offer "lockout levers" that lock the fork for long climbs or road riding, but I doubt such a device would be useful in a sixty-second race. Don't forget the weight of these forks - adding four or five pounds to many modern race bikes would send them over the thirty-pound mark.
On the other hand - Older riders with aching wrists and hands would no doubt appreciate a softer, safer landing on today's monster jumps. A suspension fork can be 'pre-loaded' prior to hitting a set of doubles, which allows you to jump higher and farther with the same effort. The 'bobbing' problem could be solved with a device that senses hard pedaling and locks the shock at that time - K2/Pro-Flex has such a device already, called the "Smart Shock". And, it would give the 30-35 Cruisers of the world an excuse to spend another six hundred bucks on their bikes. Anybody who has ever wasted money on a carbon fiber fork would be a prime marketing target for a BMX suspension-fork manufacturer.
Suspension forks probably don't really have a future in BMX as we
know it today... but perhaps downhill BMX will be the catalyst for a
"BMX Bomber". Tracks like those used for the Vans Triple Crown are
safer and easier to ride with a decent suspension - front and
rear. Oh, the heresy! Could the return of downhill racing cause the
return of the Moto-Bike, tuned-up and marked-up for the year 2003?
Watch this space, dear readers, just so you won't be... oh, I can't
bring myself to say it... ...what the heck... "shocked" by future
developments.