Why Do People Still Choose to Ride Hardtails?
Singletracks Mountain Bike Podcast
Singletracks.com
4.7 • 574 Ratings
🗓️ 31 October 2016
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
With so many great full suspension mountain bikes on the market today, why are people still riding hardtail bikes? In this episode of the Singletracks podcast, we discuss the history of mountain bike suspension and the advantages hardtail mountain bikes still have over their fully squishy brethren today.
--Keep up with the latest in mountain biking at Singletracks.com and on Instagram @singletracks
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Something unexpected has arrived in Happy Meal. |
| 0:03.2 | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Hello Kitty and friends |
| 0:05.8 | are teaming up for the ultimate collab. |
| 0:08.3 | Joining your little ones on a fun-fueled adventure. |
| 0:11.0 | Some fun, some food, it's all inside this happy meal. |
| 0:16.3 | Until the 2nd of February from 11am includes one pre-selected book or toy whilst it's last. |
| 0:20.1 | Hey everybody, welcome to the single tracks podcast. |
| 0:23.3 | My name is Jeff, and today, Aaron and Greg and I are going to be talking about hard-tail mountain bikes. |
| 0:30.5 | While a lot of riders might think that full suspension bikes are the most technologically advanced mountain bikes |
| 0:36.6 | and that they came after hardtails. |
| 0:38.9 | It turns out that hard tails and full suspension bikes were developed around the same time. |
| 0:44.2 | Early mountain bikes had zero suspension on them and were that way for almost a decade before |
| 0:49.8 | people started thinking about putting suspension on them. |
| 0:53.0 | And it turns out, I actually thought |
| 0:55.1 | that suspension forks predated full suspension bikes and that people were rolling around on hard |
| 1:01.9 | tails for a while. But it turns out that suspension was introduced roughly at the same time, |
| 1:07.9 | so front and rear suspension at the same time. So hardtails and full |
| 1:12.3 | suspension mountain bikes have coexisted together almost since the beginning of mountain biking. |
| 1:18.1 | It's interesting too to note that 55% of the bikes that single tracks members report |
| 1:23.7 | owning are full suspension, leaving 45% to be hardtail bikes. So again, about half the |
| 1:31.0 | bikes that people own and are riding are hard tails, which is surprising because a lot of us |
| 1:36.7 | might think that full suspension bikes are better or faster or more capable. So the main |
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