Revalved OHLINS Shock
This is awesome!

I finally got to put the shock that Ohlins revalved for the HRC linkage to the full test on May 6-7 at Barber. I knew from the aggressive backroad twisty riding I had been doing that it was better than the standard Ohlins shock, but you really can't comment fully on them until you get something like that on the track where lap times & tire wear tell the whole story. I gotta tell you I am more than impressed with this new valving. It works awesome & I firmly believe that the valving is in the proper range as very very small adjustments to the settings make huge differences in tire wear/grip. It was almost perfect out of the box as I tried several different settings suggested by the Ohlins tech that built it & I started suffering tire wear immediately so I went back to the original settings which alleviated the problem then I went & backed off some rebound. The lap times dropped yet again. The rear end was super compliant out there for both days even once the tires started to go off I could still manage to run extremely consistent & fairly quick laps without ever breaking a sweat. With some more testing time I know I can get this shock dialed in even better than it already is & continue to drop the lap times. For those of you that are familiar with track riding you might recognize this as one of those Holy Grail type things that just doesn't end up in our hands very often. Usually tuning a shock is much harder, but with this one you make a click here or there & literally watch the lap times drop or increase. That kind of precision takes most of the guesswork out of tuning the suspension as you can immediately see & feel the results & I personally love that.

While this has been proven to work well with the HRC linkage it was designed for there is much speculation that it would also benefit riders that are not using the HRC linkage as many riders have complained that the standard Ohlins shock was overdamped to begin with. I have no real comment as I have not tried the revalved shock using the OEM linkage, but I would not be surprised at all if this was a theory was true.

 

 

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