Suspension setup...night & day!

These settings are EXACTLY the same as those dialled in on BJ's long term loan MT10 by James at JHS Racing in Bristol for Fast Bikes mag. The second person I have read in the last two weeks to confirm they make a heck of a difference. I'll have to dial mine in once the weather in the UK picks up.

I would go ahead and do your own reserach on what you like.

Dave moss has good free youtube videos about all these types of setups.

"Suspension for mortals" on youtube is a great crash course for everything that has to do with suspension and steering geometry.

I would taylor the bike to yourself (im 6'2 and 240 pounds and the springs are too soft for my weight to beware of that), this video is a really simple how to:




Set your preload and rebound, then dont touch them anymore and just play with the compressions. The compression is all about personal preference. There is no right or wrong (if its wrong for you, youll feel it. Bumps too rough or front dives uncontrollably wjen applying brakes).

If you adjust front compression, you need to match it with the rear low speed compression. Jump on your seat without holding any brakes and see if the bike lowers equally fast on both ends.

Truth be told, I got the settings from that video and wanted to use them as a base setting. However I avoided using their sag settings as setting static sag alone is a waste of time, seeing as the bike can’t ride itself. Static sag is only of any use to determine of spring rates are correct once rider sag is set.

Since then I’ve realised the main thing I felt originally was the added weight on the front from sag being correctly set making the bike feel better. However the compression and rebound on the front were way off and didn’t work with the rear settings. They with too stiff and when hit with a gust of wind the bike would go into a mini tank slapper.

When bouncing the suspension by hand after getting it warmed up on a run I could feel the rear rebound and compression was pretty good, but the front was way over damped and was too slow. Even when trying to bounce the whole bike the rear would move and the front would pretty much stay still, far too stiff.

I’ve gone on to make changes to the fork rebound and compression. The bike no longer goes into mini tank slippers when hit by a side wind and the full bike bounces up and down simultaneously front & rear.

I’ll keep tweaking here and there, as ultimately when it gets hotter ambient temps and the oil thins out I’ll need to add back some compression & rebound dampening.

Oh, and I’ve also dropped a psi front & rear just to help generate a little more heat on these colder days.

At the moment my settings are as follows...


Front Forks

Rider Sag: 28mm

Static Sag: 18mm (stock springs are too stiff for my weight)

Compression: 15 clicks out

Rebound: 7 clicks out

Tyre Pressure: 35 psi


Rear Shock

Rider Sag: 30mm

Static Sag: 8mm

High Speed Compression: 2.5 turns out

Low Speed Compression: 7 clicks out

Rebound: 4 clicks out

Tyre Pressure: 33 psi

Because when you ride the rear will experience greater loads than the front, the rear has to provide the same grip as the front during cornering while at the same time having to put down circa 160bhp to the road.

That extra load (work) the tyre has to do will generate more heat, the more heat you generate the more the pressure in the tyre will increase.

So say I set tyre pressures at 35f & 33r after the tyres are gently warmed up on a short ride, but not pushing, it will give me good overall grip when pottering about, but when pushing hard the heat generated will put the front at say 36psi and the rear also at 36psi due to having to work harder and generate more heat.

Then there is the larger contact patch you obtain with less pressure as well, which again helps with the grip required to put down the power, however that does not mean you should set pressures at 10psi in order to obtain a larger contact patch, there is a point where you reach diminishing returns.

Then again depending on the tyre and how stiff the carcass is, you will see a lot of track riders running low to mid 20’s in the rear and high 20’s to low 30’s on the front straight off the tyre warmers.

Im not forgetting rider weight, and as you said the majority of weight is at the rear which again means the rear tyre will be under greater stress than the front and will generate more heat than the front, therefore increasing the air pressure in the rear when hot more than the front increases when hot.

In regards to being in the 20’s I just use that as an extreme example on track, I would never run that low on the rear on the roads, so no need to shout (caps lock) about the fact we are talking about road / street and not track.

Again, as an example, there was recently a WSBK team that was penalised for running the rear tyre too low in order to obtain more grip, so it’s not just me making it up, full race teams do the same, and again I use track as an example only that lower rear pressures provide greater grip.

Overall Dave is good, but he's not the best (otherwise he would be working in MotoGP and the likes), nor is he perfect. One example I have is just a lack of understanding of some of the tools he uses. In one video he puts wheels in the sun to see how warm they actually get and if you need tyre warmers on hot days which is fine, but then he uses and IR pyrometer to check the temps of his shiny chrome plated trailer ramp, which is pointless because these devices do not work on shiny reflective materials, then he used a tyre probe to check the tarmac / asphalt in the pits which is again pointless because the very end point of the probe is the only thing making contact and unlike a tyre your cannot press the entire probe into the tarmac to gain a true reading which is what is needed for these devices to operate accurately.

These might seem like small things, but they have a massive effect on readings and could cause you to get a reading of say 40*c when the real temp is well over 100*c, and I've seen that first hand when someone tried to use an IR pyrometer to check temps of they're shiny reflective brake discs, then burnt themselves after the device said the brakes were barely warm.

Like I said, he is good and I have learnt a lot from him myself, but all I’m saying is don’t take every word as gospel. Take the information and try to cross reference, try to understand for yourself, make use of multiple resources inc books on the subject. Dave is a very good resource, but just remember he is human like the rest of us is all I’m saying