Fox Podium
Travel Options: 160 & 170 mm
Wheel Size: 29’’
Offset: 44 mm
Stanchion Diameter: 36 mm
Spring Type: Air
Axle: 20 x 110 mm Boost
Stated Weight: 2,695 g
Blister’s Measured Weight: 2,756 g (170 mm travel, w/ stanchion guards)
MSRP: $2,000 USD / $2,679 CAD / €2,399
Reviewer: 6’, 160 lb / 183 cm, 72.6 kg
Bolted To: Contra MC, Geometron G1
Test Duration: 7 months
Test Locations: Washington, British Columbia
Intro
Fox made quite a splash at the 2025 Sea Otter Classic, where they prominently displayed an inverted single-crown fork in front of their booth. It was labeled as a prototype, and Fox was tight-lipped about its design details — they wouldn’t even say if it would ever make it to the public market.
But the new fork looked polished and production-ready, leading to widespread speculation that it wasn’t far off.
That speculation was correct, and we can now share all the details on the new Podium fork, and our long-term impressions of this unusual offering. There’s a lot to cover here, so let’s get right to it.
Design & Features
The inverted chassis is the big deal here. Of course, the Podium is far from the first mountain bike fork with the layout, but it is the first time one of the ‘big two’ suspension brands has given an inverted fork a go in quite some time.
For reference, Fox built a prototype inverted DH fork almost 15 years ago, but that never came to market; RockShox offered the inverted RS-1 XC fork for a few years, but it was never widely adopted.
So, why try again now?
Fox’s take is that the inverted layout helps them build a fork that’s stiffer fore-aft than their conventional Enduro fork, the Fox 38 (which isn’t going anywhere), and that the inverted layout leads to lower friction and less unsprung weight.
For starters, the Podium’s inverted layout means that the upper tubes are much larger in diameter than the stanchions on a conventional fork (47 mm for the Podium vs. 38 mm for the Fox 38).
Fork legs are more heavily stressed — especially fore-aft — up high near the crown. So, putting the larger-diameter portion up there and the smaller-diameter stanchions at the dropouts makes it easier to achieve higher fore-aft stiffness. The Podium’s crown is also much bigger than that of the 38, again to help make the fork stiffer.
The inverted layout lets Fox give the Podium more bushing overlap (i.e., the distance between the upper and lower bushing in each fork leg) than the 38 (and the dual-crown Fox 40, for that matter). That increased bushing spacing further helps stiffen the fork fore-aft and helps reduce friction when it’s heavily loaded.
In fact, Fox says that the Podium is nearly as stiff as the 40 fore-aft — which is quite a claim for a single-crown fork, especially in comparison to one of the stiffer dual-crown ones out there.
But what about torsional stiffness? Fox acknowledges that inverted MTB forks have often fallen short on that front, and while they’re not claiming that the Podium is ultra-stiff torsionally, Fox’s take is that they’ve hit a nice middle ground there.
To help stiffen things up torsionally, the Podium uses a steel 20 x 110 mm DH Boost axle with two pinch bolts on each dropout. That’s potentially inconvenient in a world where many front hubs are no longer 20 mm compatible; it’s also almost certainly the right call. I wish 15 mm axles for long-travel forks had never happened in the first place, but that ship sailed a while ago.
The tradeoff for making a fairly stiff inverted single crown is weight. The Podium weighs 2,756 grams, over 300 more than the Fox 38 (which isn’t particularly light to begin with).
As for the other chassis details, the Podium gets 36 mm-diameter stanchions and a brake mount for a 200 mm rotor; Fox condones running up to a 230mm-diameter rotor with an adapter.
The top cap for each leg features a pressure-relief valve, and Fox plans to offer a crown-mounted fender for the Podium starting in Fall 2025. The Podium is also offered with either a 58mm or 68mm-diameter crown (as measured at the crown-race interface). The 58 mm option is standard for a 1.5’’ tapered steerer tube, while the 68 mm version is meant to match the aesthetics of a chunky eMTB downtube.
Brake-hose routing can be a challenge on inverted forks. To keep things tidy and rattle-free, Fox uses a pair of bolt-on guides that attach to the non-drive side upper tube. The brake hose is secured to the top of the stanchion guard and is meant to slide through the guides on the upper tube. The stanchion guards are made from carbon fiber to reduce the unsprung weight. Fox also includes a separate brake hose guide “mast” and blanking plate for the drive side stanchion guard mount if you want to leave the guards off.
The Podium uses the Grip X2 damper that Fox debuted last year and uses in their higher-end, more gravity-oriented forks. It offers adjustable high- and low-speed compression and high- and low-speed rebound. Some of the packaging details have been tweaked to accommodate the inverted chassis of the Podium, but the fundamental damper architecture is the same as the other, non-inverted Grip X2 variants.
Fox has tweaked the standard damper tune for the Podium, though. They say that they’ve firmed up the compression tune to compensate for the fact that the Podium has less chassis friction than the 38. The inverted layout puts more of the fork’s total weight in the upper (sprung) portion of the fork. The seals and lower bushings are also submerged in oil for reduced friction, rather than needing it to be splashed up from the bottom of the lowers, as is the case with conventional forks. Fox also lightened the rebound tune because the Podium has less unsprung weight to control.
On the spring side, the Podium gets a version of the “GlideCore” air spring that Fox launched in the 36 and 36 SL earlier this year. At a high level, it’s a fairly conventional design with a self-equalizing negative spring; what sets it apart from Fox’s earlier designs is that the air shaft can deflect slightly on large O-rings in the piston and seal head to reduce friction and binding when the fork is flexed.
Formula has done something similar for some time now (including on the Selva V that we’ve also reviewed), and it makes a lot of sense on paper. Any fork is going to flex appreciably to one degree or another under real-world conditions, and when that happens, the stanchion and spring shaft come slightly out of alignment. Allowing them to float slightly should reduce the side loading on the air piston and thus the amount of friction in the spring.
The Podium uses volume spacers to tune the amount of progression in the air spring, as Fox does across their whole fork lineup. The Podium spacers come in 5 cc increments to give finer tuning options (the clip-on spacers that Fox uses in most of their forks are 10 cc in volume).
FULL REVIEW
I wouldn’t have had Fox releasing an inverted single-crown fork on my 2025 bingo card, but my curiosity was more than a little piqued when we got word that one was on the way. It had been a long time since any of the major manufacturers had taken a stab at an inverted single crown (especially a longer-travel one; the short-lived RockShox RS1 XC fork was the most recent example from one of the bigger brands). In an era where a lot of bike development looks more like incremental refinement than major evolution, Fox trying something genuinely different is more than a little noteworthy.
A few smaller manufacturers have continued to push the inverted single crown concept, but they’ve yet to reach widespread popularity, and it often takes a more established player joining the fray to get a niche technology to really take off (for better or worse). So, will the Podium usher in an inverted fork renaissance? Or, more specifically, should it?
Having spent a ton of time on the Podium, I don’t think it’s for everyone, but it also does some things extremely well. So, who should have the Podium on their wish list, and who will be better off with a more conventional option? Let’s dig in.
Setup
Setting up the Podium should feel familiar for folks who’ve gone through the process with Fox’s more conventional long-travel single-crown fork, the 38 Grip X2. That’s not to say that you can copy/paste settings from one to the other — far from it — but there’s still a lot of crossover in their tuning parameters.
Their shared damper (albeit with a different tune — more on that in a minute) certainly helps, but a lot of the similarities come down to their respective air springs. Some long-travel single-crown forks (notably the RockShox Zeb) are quite progressive by default, but both the 38 and Podium are less progressive overall, leaving more leeway to tune with volume spacers. With both forks set at 170 mm of travel, I’ve settled on two volume spacers in the 38 (out of a maximum of five) and four (out of eight maximum) in the Podium, though it’s worth noting that the Podium volume spacers are half the size of the 38 ones (5cc vs 10cc).
I also prefer to run more air pressure in both forks than Fox recommends for my weight, by roughly similar margins. For the Podium, that worked out to about 88 psi (give or take a couple, depending on the bike in question). At lower pressures, I just don’t have as much support as I want when pushing harder on faster, rougher trails; I can actually go a bit higher without small bump sensitivity and grip suffering too badly (and make the fork more lively in the process), but around 88 psi got me the front-to-rear balance I was looking for.
On the damper side, Fox says they’ve given the Podium a firmer compression tune to compensate for the fact that it’s got less friction than the 38 (friction is crude, poorly controlled damping, of a sort), and a lighter rebound tune since the Podium has less unsprung weight to control. Despite those tweaks, I still settled on slightly firmer compression settings on the Podium (HSC -2, LSC -6) than I do on the 38, and slightly faster rebound than Fox recommends for my air pressure setting (HSR -6, LSR -10).
On-Trail Performance
The first thing that stands out about the Podium is how smooth and low-friction it is. It’s noticeable straight away how freely the Podium moves, and the initial sensitivity and grip that it delivers are exceptional.
[For what it’s worth, some folks on the internet have noted that the Podium displays appreciable chassis friction once you install a wheel and clamp down the axle. Our review sample does, too, but only very slightly. With the internals and wipers removed, and the axle installed but not clamped on both sides, the stanchions drop smoothly into the uppers under their own weight when the fork is turned upside down. With a hub (on its own, not laced into a wheel) installed and the axle clamped down, the fork no longer fully compresses under its own weight, but only requires an exceedingly light touch with a fingertip to do so. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good.]
I’m also impressed with the Podium’s chassis stiffness. It’s noticeably less stiff torsionally than a Fox 38 or RockShox ZEB, but by a smaller margin than I would have guessed, and — I think more importantly — the Podium is much stiffer fore-aft.
I’ve been banging this drum for a while, but I find fore-aft stiffness to be much more of a limitation than torsional stiffness with conventional single-crown forks. A little torsional flex is relatively easy to adapt to (and has some benefits in making the front wheel less prone to pinging off of off-camber impacts), but fore-aft flex leads to much more binding in the fork and can make it feel chattery under heavy braking as the fork ricochets back and forth. The Podium’s combination of quite good fore-aft stiffness and middle-of-the-road torsional stiffness works quite well, and I think it deserves a good chunk of the credit for how smooth the Podium feels, especially under heavy braking on steep descents. It’s a very noticeable step up from the class of 38mm-stanchioned conventional single-crown forks on that front.
The ultra-smooth, planted feel of the Podium is its most standout attribute, but it manages to do so while also providing pretty good support and composure when pushing it harder. Granted, I am running the high-speed compression adjuster at the firmer end of the range, and only weigh about 160 lb / 72.6 kg geared up, but I’m able to get excellent sensitivity and grip out of the Podium while still maintaining a level of support I’m happy with.
That’s no small thing. As I’ve talked about in a lot of fork reviews over the years, midstroke support is high on the list of things I care about in a fork (longer-travel ones especially), and often settle on setups that forgo some initial sensitivity to help keep the fork up in its travel on steeper, rougher descents. I’m able to maintain much better small bump sensitivity and grip while getting the level of support I want from the Podium than I can with the Fox 38 or RockShox Zeb, and those advantages feel most pronounced when pushing it hard on steeper, faster descents.
And, to bring it back around, I think the Podium’s chassis deserves a lot of the credit there. Its Grip X2 damper is very good, but is also featured in the 38, and their respective air springs don’t feel wildly different, either. But the Podium is substantially smoother in its movement — especially when heavily loaded fore-aft — and hits a middle ground on torsional stiffness that I really like. It’s stiff enough to offer respectable steering precision, but has enough give to feel a lot less pingy on lower speed off-camber impacts than, say a Fox 40 (still the all around stiffest fork I’ve ridden).
That comes at a substantial weight penalty compared to the 38, but I think Fox has struck a reasonable balance here. The Podium isn’t for the more weight-conscious folks out there, and that’s fine. The 38 (and maybe the 36, depending on what travel you’re running) are there if you want something lighter. The Podium was designed to minimize friction and hit the level of chassis stiffness Fox wanted first, and weight was lower down the priority list. I’m a big fan of the chassis feel they achieved, and if the Podium needs to weigh 2,700+ grams to get there, so be it.
[That’s not to say that Fox threw weight considerations out the window entirely — they’re the reason that there isn’t a 180 mm travel Podium. Fox would have needed to beef the chassis up further to hit the stiffness targets they wanted at 180 mm travel, and add some more weight in doing so.]
Having A-B tested the Podium against the 38 on the same bike, the weight difference is noticeable to the extent that I can tell that the Podium is heavier when lifting up on the bars, but it’s not enough to make me think about it when riding. Granted, I’ve been running the Podium on bikes that aren’t light to begin with, but its performance feels best matched to burly, descending-focused Enduro bikes, where I’d want to run DH casing tires, beefy wheels, big brakes, and so on. In that context, the weight doesn’t feel like a big deal.
The biggest tradeoff I’ve found with the Podium (at least from a pure suspension performance standpoint) is that, when set up as I prefer overall, it doesn’t feel very energetic — adjectives like “planted” come to mind much more readily than “lively” or “poppy.” You can, of course, tune around that to some extent (chiefly with more spring pressure and/or faster rebound), but doing so introduces tradeoffs elsewhere. The sensation feels most noticeable at lower speeds in tighter, more awkward bits of trail when trying to pop over a small hole or similar.
It’s not a major limitation by any stretch — and, frankly, I feel like I need to make fewer tuning compromises with the Podium than I do with a lot of other forks. I’m just most impressed with the Podium when pushing it harder on faster, burlier trails, and its upsides don’t feel as pronounced on mellower terrain. The Podium’s chassis is what really sets it apart, with its excellent fore-aft stiffness and minimal friction — especially when heavily loaded, in situations where a lot of other forks would bind up appreciably — and those upsides are most pronounced when you’re riding it aggressively.
Reliability & Servicing
The wiper seal lifespan on the Podium hasn’t been great in my experience. The first set that came in the fork only lasted about two months before the spring side leg started leaking badly; the replacements have fared better, but the spring side leg is starting to weep very slightly after about five months. To be fair, I’ve ridden the Podium a lot over that time, and the current seals are holding well enough that I haven’t been in a rush to replace them yet. Still, it’d be nice to get a bit more life out of them. I’ll probably try a set of SKF dual compound seals next — they have held up very well for me in other forks — and I’ll report back once I have enough time on those to weigh in.
The good news is that the Podium is quite easy to work on (and you can disassemble the legs separately if you just want to work on one side, though I’d personally just do both while I’m at it). The spring assembly is upside down compared to a conventional fork, but the procedure for opening it up isn’t much different, and the whole process will be straightforward for anyone comfortable doing a lower leg service on a conventional fork.
Another, much more niche issue I ran into on the Podium is its compatibility with Trickstuff’s 6 mm diameter braided brake hoses. The stock hose guides on the Podium work nicely with standard 5 mm Kevlar hoses (as featured on the vast majority of brakes out there), but the bigger 6 mm Trickstuff ones don’t fit in the bolt-on guide that attaches to the top of the stanchion guard (or the mast that takes its place, if you choose to forgo the guards).
I 3D printed myself a version sized for the 6mm hose, but that presented another problem: the braided Goodridge hose is much more flexible than conventional Kevlar ones, and instead of sliding cleanly through the guides on the upper tube, it bowed out between the guide at the top of the stanchion guard and the lower of the two upper tube guides. That quickly kinked the hose badly enough to break the inner lining and cause it to leak.
I replaced the hose and made an extended version of my 3D printed guide that supports the hose above the stanchion guard, and had no further issues, but folks looking to pair the Podium with braided stainless steel brake hoses should be warned. Trickstuff also offers standard 5mm Kevlar hoses for the Maxima brakes (though those also require new fittings), which I haven’t tried but should work fine — just like most conventional hoses.
Bottom Line
The Fox Podium performs extremely well. It’s also heavy, expensive, and goes through wiper seals faster than I’d like. Those tradeoffs won’t be for everyone, but the Podium’s sensitivity, grip, and chassis feel are genuinely stellar. The Podium’s advantages are going to be most pronounced for aggressive, skilled riders pushing it hard in burly terrain — its fore-aft stiffness and minimal binding under heavy loading, in particular, are exceptional. It’s an unapologetically burly long-travel single-crown fork for aggressive, descending-focused riding, and in that role, it’s outstanding.