Suspension school · Tuning by Riding Style

Bike Park and Uplift Days

Progressive, well damped and shod in DH rubber for lap after lap

A bike park day removes the eMTB's usual compromise entirely. Nobody cares how it climbs. What is left is a 23kg bike hitting bigger jumps, deeper holes and longer braking-bump fields than anything at home, lap after lap. The setup swings hard toward progression and damping.

Deeper Sag, More Progression

• Shock sag: run the deep end, right around 30%, for grip and calm in the chatter
• Fork sag: toward 20%, the fork works constantly at park speeds
• Volume spacers: add one over your trail setup as a start, heavier and faster riders often add two
• High-speed compression: one to two clicks firmer for big compressions and landings
• Rebound: one to two clicks slower than trail, high-speed hits arrive too quickly for a fast rebound to stay composed

Deep sag plus added progression is the combination that works. The top of the stroke stays soft for grip and comfort through braking bumps, while the spacers stop the big hits reaching the end. On a Fox 38 the maximum spacer counts are worth knowing before you start stacking: six at 160mm travel, five at 170mm, four at 180mm. Other forks have similar published limits, so check the service chart rather than guessing.

Hydraulic Bottom-Out

Some shocks give you a separate tool for the end of the travel. RockShox's Vivid and Super Deluxe Coil carry a five-position hydraulic bottom-out (HBO) adjuster that adds damping only in roughly the final 20% of the stroke. If your shock has it, use HBO against harsh bottom-outs before you reach for a third volume spacer. Spacers stiffen the mid-stroke as a side effect; HBO does not.

DH Casings at Both Ends

Park braking bumps and rock gardens at 40km/h are exactly what DH casings exist for, and on an uplift day their weight costs you nothing. Maxxis DH, Schwalbe Super DH or Radial Gravity, Continental DH and Specialized GRID Gravity are the appropriate tier. A rear insert is cheap insurance, and in genuinely rocky parks run one at both ends.

• Add 1 to 2psi over your trail pressures, berms and jump faces load tyres far harder than natural trail
• With DH casings and an insert you can instead hold your normal pressure and bank the extra support
• Recheck pressures every few laps in summer, tyres and dampers both run warm on repeated descents

Running the Day

• Ride the first lap at 80% and audit the setup: full travel used more than once means go firmer, a bone-dry O-ring means you can give some back
• Recheck sag after lunch, warm air springs and slow seepage both move it
• Re-torque the rear axle and check linkage bolts midday, park chatter finds loose hardware faster than anything at home
• If arm pump arrives by lap four, open high-speed compression a click before blaming your gloves

Treat the park tune as a separate saved setup, not a tweak. It typically sits a spacer, a few psi and three or four clicks away from your home tune, which is exactly the sort of thing you will misremember in a car park at 8am. The calculator's saved tunes exist for this.