BikeRadar has been out in Finale Ligure, Italy for the gruelling last round of the Enduro World Series. It would have been downright remiss of us not to have a nosey around the pits to check out the pro riders' tech – and here's what we found.
Damper switching
The newly-crowned champion, Richie Rude, has been using the new Fox 36 fork, which features an easy-to-use 15mm QR axle, and FiT4 damper. However, he swapped to the more adjustable RC2 damper for this round, as it offers better control. Teammate and victor in Finale, Jarred Graves, used a custom-tuned version of the standard Fit4 damper.
Prototype pedals
Cube’s Nico Lau was spotted with a prototype version of Shimano’s popular trail pedal, seen here on the right next to his teammate’s XTR trail item.
Return of the coils
Greg Callaghan and Nico Lau swapped between Fox’s lightweight and pedal-friendly Float-X shock and these coil-sprung X2 units depending on the nature of the stages at hand.
It was coil springs all round in the Giant pits though. A brace of Vivid coils for Josh Carlson and Yoann Barelli.
Wheel and tyre trickery
The label on the rim below says Procore, but that’s a standard tubeless valve. Apparently, the Cube action team didn’t use Schwalbe’s Procore system at this round.
The Cube team were however packing lightweight inner tubes taped to their frames. Every gram counts!
We spotted this highly cut-down Schwalbe Magic Mary in the Canyon pits. The ramped cutaways are intended to reduce rolling resistance, but we’ve heard of this practice backfiring as the treads become further apart.
Some kind of big-spender doesn’t want us to know what rubber they’re running. You can’t fool us!
Meanwhile, Curtis Keene chose to run hefty DH-casing Specialized Butcher tyres front and rear on his Enduro 650b – an option unavailable to him on his 29er.
We spotted this Roval Traverse front wheel on Curtis' bike. The oversized end caps look like they may be designed to take advantage of SRAM's Torque Cap technology for extra stiffness.
