What makes SUPERLIGHT™ so efficient?

What makes SUPERLIGHT™ so efficient?

The (super)lightest suspension

Our priority with the Blur was to ensure that every kilojoule of a rider's energy is translated into forward thrust. That meant making something lightweight but also really efficient.

Cross-country racing isn't a power lap around the park anymore. The courses are challenging and the competition fierce. Superlight™ provides traction to avoid the wobblers but keeps overall weight down. By reducing the amount of moving parts, bearings and linkages we saved 289g over the previous Blur.

Smart frame, stock shock

Hold onto your bidons, it's about to get nerdy.

Instead of relying on a high anti-squat figure to resist excessive bobbing from a progressive, high leverage shock curve, we looked to the leverage curve to provide more of the support and control. This concept results in a lower and more consistent leverage curve which enabled us to reduce anti-squat, and therefore chain influence on the suspension. This allows the rear tire to have more traction and sensitivity in both climbing and descending scenarios, but also produces a much more efficient forward drive because less pedaling input, from anti-squat, is utilized to overcome the rider's body weight influence on the suspension. The overall package results in a lower demand on the shock to finesse the performance through specific internals or custom sizes.

Cross-country racing isn't a power lap around the park anymore. The courses are challenging and the competition fierce. Superlight™ provides traction to avoid the wobblers but keeps overall weight down. By reducing the amount of moving parts, bearings and linkages we saved 289g over the previous Blur.

Santa Cruz engineered carbon

Without the lower link or an additional pivot somewhere out back how does it work? The stays actually flex a small amount. But building flex into a carbon component means engineering it in a way that it moves in the direction you want, with the right amount of spring force considered.

Those spring forces affect the feel and performance of the suspension, and required a lot of work to understand and manipulate properly. Because we have our own carbon laboratory in California and skilled composites specialists we were able to test and experiment with different carbon fiber layups until we struck the right balance between flex, damping and durability.

Our modern, warranty backed, carbon technology along with our in-house carbon engineering know-how is what makes the Blur not just some one season, one-off whip designed to hit weight targets but something that will keep going and going.

What we’ve come up with does a great job at maximizing both traction and efficiency, which is important for World Cup XC racing. Or beer league Wednesday night battles.

 

 CHECK OUT THE ALL NEW 2022 BLUR CC