Quote:
Originally Posted by toEleven
I'm partial to the Elf endurance racers, among older examples. Norman Hossack did some nifty stuff as well.
As far as I've heard or read, that difference in feeling has not changed. The last newer iteration I recall hearing about - and there does not seem to be many - was the Taylormade CARBON2 designed for Moto2 (note: not hub centered, but alternative front suspension setups are rare enough for me to feel comfortable lumping them all in together  ). To my knowledge, it has been adopted by zero teams and contested zero actual races in any category.
Having never ridden a setup like this, I wonder: is it an actual lack of information from the bike, or just the shortcoming of riders who've spent their entire lives learning to interpret conventional forks? |
When you are racing at the highest levels, the difference between first and also-ran is only a few tenths of a second. Any potential advantage must be weighed against the time it will take in learning how to exploit a new setup and the available time for finding that advantage is extremely short. Often times the closeness of the racing makes it a very tough choice to forsake a known quantity to gain a possible advantage. Think about it this way: In the Moto2 paddock there are any number of race winning Ohlins fork experts that you can glean setup information from. If you have your own newly designed suspension system, guess who the expert is. You are. Something that shows even more clearly how tough it is to gain an advantage is the number of teams running Ohlins forks in MotoGP vs the number of teams running Showa forks. (I think maybe one guy was running Showa last year.) Now, I bet if you or I rode on that Showa fork we would think that it was the greatest thing since somebody thought it was a good idea to put a motor on a bicycle, but that guy who had to use the Showa forks was thinking only one thing: "I wish I had the Ohlins forks." And we are talking about the difference between two of the same type of forks that are the very best that the two companies can make. That is why we don't see eight different front ends on racing grids.
In the long run, I don't think that racers care what the front end looks like as long as they can feel what the front end is doing. It's a wonderful thing when you get on a bike that has really good front end feel. Instant confidence. My best example of a bike with awesome front end feel is my old Honda RS125. Best way I can describe how it felt is that it was like you had your hand right on the pavement.
You have to approach your racing a lot differently if the front end performs well, but you can't feel what is going on. Without the feel, you have to take an approach where you go into a corner a little faster and kind of hold your breath till you get through it and find out everything is ok. With good front end feel, you can approach the corner a little faster because you can tell more of what's going on and you can deal with things (little slides, etc) before you wind up on your head. It's definitely less stressful to work on going faster when you have good feedback from the front end.
BTW, the 250 Ninja really is surprisingly good as far as feel goes.