The Ohlins Rear Shock
The main highlight of the S-Works’ build, without a doubt, is the Ohlins TTX22m rear shock. Ohlins has been making shocks for dirt bikes and other motorized vehicles for quite a while, and has dabbled in mountain bikes a bit, lending some of their expertise to Cane Creek in the development of the Double Barrel. But the TTX22m mounted on the S-Works marks the first time that an Ohlins branded shock has become available for a mountain bike.
My own Demo 8 I, and previous iterations of the S-Works Demo, came with the Cane Creek Double Barrel, which is a very good rear shock. It has a ton of adjustability, and after a bit of time dialing it in, it can be made to feel pretty dang good. The Ohlins has quite a bit less adjustability than the CCDB; the Ohlins has rebound, low-speed compression, and a 3-click, high-speed compression adjustment, where the CCDB has a full range of high and low compression adjustments as well as beginning and end stroke rebound adjustments.
But the full range of adjustments on the CCDB aren’t necessarily all that useful. For any given bike, you’ll most likely only end up using a few clicks in either direction from Cane Creek’s recommended settings. The Ohlins shock is tuned specifically for the Demo and therefore it’s adjustments are finer from the start.
What really struck me about the Ohlins was how glued to the ground the Demo’s rear end felt before I even started playing with the adjustments. I’ve ridden my Cane Creek for a while and I feel like I have it pretty dialed in, but in switching bikes between my Demo with the CCDB and the Ohlins clad S-Works, the differences were immediately apparent. The rear end of the S-Works was more composed in pretty much every situation: it skittered less under hard braking, it floated through small chatter better, and it never felt like it got overwhelmed on even the hardest of hits.
I was also impressed that, regardless of what I did with the settings, I could never get the Ohlins to really feel bad. After some fiddling, I certainly settled with a combination of low-speed and high-speed compression that I liked best, but even when I sent the adjustments to one end of the range or the other, the shock never felt horrible. The Cane Creek on my Demo 8 I does feel horrible if I send the adjustments way out of whack.
There is one aspect of the Ohlins’ performance that I thought was pretty bad, however: the S-Works jumped horribly. Switching back and forth on bikes, lapping Whistler’s A-line or Dirt Merchant, I found that I had to come into jumps with more speed and pop harder to clear them on the S-Works than any other bike I tried (including my own Demo, which aside from frame material, rear-end spacing, and its rear shock, is essentially identical to the S-Works). The S-Works Demo just didn’t like to leave the ground, and I can only attribute this to the Ohlins shock.
After playing with the shock’s compression adjustments, I got the S-Works to jump better, but it never really jumped well. The bike was perfectly comfortable in the air; it wasn’t sketchy or unstable at all, and it didn’t kick me weird off of the lips. It just didn’t pop off of jumps as well as any of the other bikes I rode during our test at Whistler.
Of the bikes we rode in Whistler, the Knolly Podium was the undisputed king of jumping, and I felt like I had to go twice as fast and pop twice as hard on the S-Works to get the same amount of air.
The S-Works is a race bike, and it’s made to go fast, and the Ohlins shock does a tremendous job of all of the things that help make a bike go fast. But if you’re looking for a park bike that you can go run a bazillion laps on A-line all day long, the S-Works probably isn’t the steed for you.
*A side note on Demos and rear shocks: the linkage on Demos puts a lot of stress on rear shocks, the bikes are notorious for snapping Cane Creek shocks, and rumor has it that the Ohlins are not immune from this issue. While the 2015 S-Works has a re-designed rear end that looks like it may solve this issue, all other 2015 Demo models retain the same linkage around the shock. Make sure to keep that linkage pivoting smoothly to minimize stress on the shock shafts.