180mm Fork on Trek Rail

[zaykay]

Interested in where this info is from? Tracey Mosely was running 180mm fork for the EWSe recently

She mentioned running 170mm on recent Sam’s bikes interview. I have been testing both stock 160mm and 170 mm air springs and IMO 160mm is better for generic trail riding. 170mm works if downhill is your main thing. Even on downhill 160mm works better in tight corners.

 

[duri1]

Reporting back from a morning on the trails

Wow, it’s better than I could have expected.

I started with the settings that came out of the trek suspension calculator for a 2021 Rail 9.8 which comes with a 160 ZEB Ultimate. I’ve got about 24mm sag or about 15% sag as per the markings on the stanchion.

The geometry feels very similar to the stock forks with Mino Link in LOW.

It’s definitely riding higher though as not one pedal strike on the rocky climbs where id usually pick up a couple pedal strikes if I’m not careful.

In the berms I felt I had to push the bike down a tad more to keep the front wheel from wanting to climb out, the whole bike seemed a bit more resistant to wanting to lean over at speed. Likely to do with the higher center of gravity, but this is not a problem though and i quickly got used to it.

As far as the fork goes though; over small bumps like a cobbled road for example it feels basically the same as the Yari. As soon as those bumps start to become slightly bigger it starts to shine and it properly eats them up. Rock gardens are a whole different experience to the Yari, I feel like this is where this fork really shines - you can be so lazy with the line choice as it just irons out everything. It exceeded my expectations. Like seriously SERIOUSLY.

on the jump lines I can’t really comment, if you’re not landing flat it’s all pretty smooth on both forks, however I did notice that when preloading for the jump face I didn’t get the same pop as the Yari, it was far more soft and progressive. I think it’s probably just down the the pressure I’m running /volume spacers - the fork is pretty linear stock.

I could definitely feel the rear shock behaves a bit like a pogo vs the ZEB which is like a cloud, so will probably look at changing that out next.

All of this being said, Strava agreed that the ZEB is faster - not to bore you with my segment data, but lately my times have been extremely consistent (last 3 runs are exactly the same, to the second.) and today I smashed all of them by 3-5 seconds, including bringing home a new KOM. I mean what better reason to change to a ZEB, right ?.

Thanks for review.

I have the same dilemma as you had. I'm considering 3 models because of my budget:
1. Yari with RC2 upgrade 170mm
2. Yari with RC2 upgrade 180mm
3. Zeb Select 180mm

It means you will keep the 180mm fork with High MinoLink setup, or downgrade to 170mm?