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Pretty sure they shelved the air shock testing.
I would put money on a lower perch failure. Retaining clip popped out of the groove or sheared is my guess.
We don’t see any oil or smoke from suspension oil hitting hot exhaust.
KTM/WP has never really seemed to understand swingarm dynamics. Their PDS shock was an abject failure of a design. We used to run a thrust bearing on the PDS shock because the thing twisted when compressed.
Bajaj found the shock spring collar on the beach in Alang where they break ships.
They still haven't figured this out since 2012?
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All coil springs twist when they compress
If you can 'adjust' your shock , within its built operating window, so that it can catastrophically fail, then you are doing something wrong .
Dampers are not hard to make, methods and materials are all pretty much as they have been for years, and the only changes that have really happened is the ability to 5 Axis machine pretty shapes, and the development of coatings and seal materials.
I will go as far as to say that WP know what they are doing, but someone somewhere is missing something, repeatedly.
One of my old colleagues owns this company High Technology Suspension Сompany | R53 Suspension and he is doing stuff for high end road cars and desert racing that is a level above what any demands of a 110KG MX bike can provide.
And if it isnt a design issue, then its a quality problem, and again , that is down to someone thinking something is something it isnt, and it wont be the first time. Tolerance stack up's can render what is a perfect design on CAD , useless in operation because of poor dimensioning and drawings that dont convey design intent.
And you arent checking this stuff with a vernier and a micrometer, i spent $150,000 on equipment for damper inspection, back in 2005 , you have to be able to prove that this stuff is right before you put it together else, well you get what they are getting.
This is why Honda, kawi and others Japanese brands are so sensitive to not go outside what they know will not fail. Impossible to test and set limits on everything you can do with a shock.
But doing something wrong, yes sure it fails but it could be as easy as they are running very low or high bladder pressures and it's causing effects that they cant simulate or dyno in an easy way. No one normally runs as low as 6 bar, but I know factory suspension mechanics use that in setup on WP (have one setup myself). I don't think any wp center would run that based on their own findings. Is 6 bar within the normal operating window? No, not according i any manuals. Does it work? Apparently.
Would be surprised if they haven't had the shocks on dyno with heat and they work fine, but still fails at the track.
I agree with others here also, bike typically dont run that low in rear if it rides on spring only. Specially SX that are a few spring rates up. So maybe not the normal shock failure they see.
You can literally pull off to the side of the road that runs next to the Ktm facility and just watch. Or sit in the field next to it. It isn’t some secret place, it’s directly across the street from a neighborhood and right underneath a local airport. There’s tons of places anyone could just watch from.
Damnit dude I had my hopes up for this team for like 3 days and now this shit? 🤣 Hopefully KTM realizes that this team is a legit contender and the only thing that will hold them back is this WP suspension.
Wet Phart Suspension
I tried to watch the KTM boys at the corona location several years ago, I was in the road standing on my truck bed, not on their property and I was approached by a KTM employee telling me to leave and that Roger didnt want me there. This was back when Andrew Short was on the team
Lol. He actually named Roger?
All of that land was owned by one person at that time. You weren’t supposed to be there. The new track, is in the middle of a neighborhood, people walk there dogs past the track
Hard to comprehend how this continues to happen. Totally backs Vialle’s reluctance to ride…. And definitely a little Chase vindication.
I thought the kyb internals was for the forks, can you do it to the shock too? Or do you mean put an actual kyb shock on the bike, is that even possible?
Chase's dad has some for sale...
I can valve any of the shocks to cavitate and fail. It's not the machining. AER were about impossible to valve properly for a 2T, Xact was the WP solution. Nothing magic here, the tuning point where the KTM system performs best is outside of the parameters the fluid can handle.
I would’ve told him that’s cool but ima keep watching lol
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Vialle was the first thing that came to my mind when I saw the thread. Some of us were really hard on him when he decided to sit out the last moto. I can't even imagine what it's like to be a professional rider being anxious to ride your bike, specially at that speed. Hope they can figure this out specially for their riders safety.
I was being sarcastic with the biblical amounts. It was more because of how sticky the mud was at Matterley that year. The MXGP HRC team didn’t have problems because they were running Showa. KYB acknowledged the failure in the press release by Honda.
Unless, you have some other info about the shock failure.
KYB complete shock if so. You can run different pistons, valving, compression adjusters etc but they would lose the setup feeling they have and it might not fix the problem.
What I feel bad for Eli about, is if he had ridden the bike with that great setup (that will/might eventually fail) and like the bike based on it. But now he won't be able to get the same feel and performance anymore.
This is what a spring retainer failure looks like. KYB system works differently than Showa. Bumper cup packed with mud, then expanded to where it blew it past the retainer. Just an FYI.
That interview was a bit odd. The REP guy knew something about WP and didn’t want to say anything because he didn’t want to get in trouble which is understandable but Im surprised Steve didn’t bring it up with the co-hosts after the interview to discuss it further.
The valving/over heating issue is not what seems to have happened to Prado. But it is yet another issue. Can they get Mark J on a support contract?
That they have not had the issues in Europe would seemingly make it clear they are doing something different within US WP. Different production, materials, finishes, oil, or a different valving spec.
I think everybody who shit on him owes vialle an apology…
That would be fair, yes!
It was obvious Vialle was struggling mentally with confidence in the bike. He had numerous shock failures, and you can’t trust it when that happens.
As for Eli and Jorge, man things are going to get interesting. A slowly dying company, failures in a sector that shouldn’t be happening, I just see a lot of chaos and head scratching. AP gets so much credit for keeping a happy face while out with the Epstein bar virus.
Orange is going to have issues throughout the year. SX may be alright.
The shock setup on the 250 and 450 is presumably different with the 250 production rule? Is that still a thing?
Pretty wild to see that it fails so often. Is the team still on their 2025 season allocation of parts? Or have they been able to receive new stuff from WP already?
Post a reply to: Hearing Prado already had a shock blow