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The Shop
But I will agree with your most expensive statement. The billet BFRC shock body for the 13-16 CRF450R chassis is a work of art.
I've always been curious how rigid and smooth those forks are.
nitron
ohlins
moton
KW? Bilstein?
(and penske)
have most of the marketshare in the club and pro markets. even subaru's own rally team, for example, uses euro stuff instead of japanese.
Sölva
Öhlins
WP
Marzocchi
Sachs
Reiger
Japan:
Showa
Kayaba
There is no such thing as the best suspension.
You can get any of the top level setups to work similarly.
You could also have badly setup Showa A-kits vs well setup stockers and the latter would perform better.
Did anything move in regards of 52mm WP's in US recently? I have read something about them but nothing 100% reliable.
I never knew there were showa 51mm's! Any pics Slip? That is interesting.
Pit Row
For example, at that level the teams either have access to or are provided lower tubes that have been cherry picked from hundreds of samples based on specific inspection criteria. Straightness, thickness and uniformity of walls, roundness, stiffness, etc. Then the tubes are treated to special coatings and further testing. Uppers probably receive the same attention.
During assembly of the main tubes, dozens of bushings are probably fit checked and only those bushings that create the tolerances desired are used. In some cases, if extremely tight tolerances are required each bushing might get some minor machining specific to that location only.
Triple clamps are most likely re-machined for absolute orthogonality, assembled with the tube assemblies/front axle and inspected for smooth operation from full extension to bottom. Everything is probably indexed and marked for reassembly. Specific torques and sequences are probably dictated as well.
Main seals and wipers can be modified by inserting light compression seal springs (or leave them out entirely), trim redundant sealing lips, etc. They only need to hold oil for one race, and a trace amount of film (leakage) is probably a good thing.
Plugs can be inserted to change the total internal volume and along with oil volume dictate the ramp rate of internal air pressure.
All that and they haven't even touched the cartridge/damping circuits yet! As you can imagine, the same approach is probably used here as well. Careful selection and assembly of parts so that everything works together.
Frankly, I don't think any team has some "magic" damping circuit(s) and although I've seen some pretty creative ideas they're still just variations on a common theme. However, in addition to the chosen valving approach some detailing can still help. Valving ports can be carefully radiused to prevent turbulence and attention to "where/how the flow proceeds after it detaches from the port/shim stack is evaluated for proper pressure recovery and "backing" plates are massaged appropriately.
Obviously, there's thousands of possible piston/port/shim stacks possible, but the shims themselves are probably carefully selected from the best materials and thoroughly deburred before use.
Spring seats can utilize thrust bearings to minimize spring windup as well.
So, no secrets, just intense attention the detail and the ability to optimize the design.
Bottom line, it's really about getting the rider comfortable and if (name top 5 SX rider here) was suddenly 3 sec/lap faster after the team forgot to put oil in the forks I'd gotta believe they'd figure out some way to replicate that setup!
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