Installation
Installing the Turbine is really easy if you’ve had practice before, but it was a bit fussy the first time I had a go at it. The cable from the lever is routed into an aluminum quick-connect fitting, which unscrews from the bottom of the post. Unscrewing the quick-connect is also how the post is removed from the frame – unscrewing the quick-connect doesn’t affect the cable setup or tension, so the post can be pulled out of the frame for cleaning without having to reset anything.
The fussy part of the setup is that it’s critical to have a little bit of slack in the cable, leaving some play at the lever. If you don’t have that little bit of slack, the post will slip. That in and of itself isn’t that difficult; setting up the cable with a little bit of slack is easy enough. But I’ve found while riding that the pressure on the hydraulics in the post seems to change slightly, which manifests itself as a tightening or slackening of the cable. I’ll get into that more below, but in terms of setup, it means you have to leave yourself enough room on the barrel adjuster at the lever to compensate for this, and it took me a couple of tries before I got that set in a way that worked consistently.
The Ride + Some Quirks
When this post is working correctly, it’s awesome. I’ve been using the 1x lever that sits below the bar, and it’s one of the most ergonomic dropper levers I’ve used. (And it comes in colors!) As a side note, the 1x lever will work with lots of other cable actuated posts as well — it pulls up to 11 mm of cable, so any post that uses that pulls less than 11 mm should work. Paired with the Turbine, the lever action is light, the post return is smooth, and it’s pretty easy to dial in the return speed of the post by messing around with the air pressure.
There’s minimal play in the post, the head doesn’t creak, and I don’t have to be careful about not pulling up on the seat when the post is dropped. In other words, it does everything I want a dropper post to do, and as an added bonus, it’s reasonably light. At just over 500 g for the 150 mm version, it’s lighter than Fox Transfer, and in the same ballpark as a KS Lev, Rockshox Reverb, and Thomson Covert.
But there are some quirks. First, as I alluded to above, the pressure in the hydraulic chamber seems to fluctuate a bit. According to Race Face, part of the issue is the amount of cable throw in the lever, but they’re revising newer versions of the lever to reduce throw and solve this issue. But it also seems that the hydraulics are a bit sensitive to temperature and possibly even elevation changes. On quite a few rides, I’ve started with the post working perfectly, but it then started slipping on me as a result of the cable tightening itself slightly.
I haven’t tried the new lever from Race Face with the reduced throw, but I’ve started leaving a bit more slack in the cable, and I’ve also started leaving more room in the barrel adjuster to adjust the cable tension mid-ride. After talking to Race Face, they also recommended doing a reset procedure, which essentially involves fully depressing the lever and holding it there for a few seconds. This seemed to help, but I still end up using the barrel adjuster on occasion. None of this is the end of the world, but I’ve filed it under “mild annoyances that keep this post from being perfect.”
The second annoyance is that the post seems to slowly leak air. When it gets low on air, the post doesn’t like to return all the way up — mine tends to hang up about 40 mm below full extension. Again, this is an easy fix: every couple of weeks, I pump the post back up to around 35 psi. But the air valve is under the seatpost head, which means I have to pull the seat off, which is a hassle.
Durability and Maintenance
I have about 5 months on this post, which isn’t really long enough to arrive at a definitive conclusion regarding durability. That said, the only issues I’ve had are the cable tension and air pressure quirks noted above. I haven’t encountered any issues that made the post non-functional. The only maintenance I’ve done on the post was re-lubing it once when things seemed to be getting a little sticky after a few muddy rides.
At the risk of sounding like an apologist, the issues with the Turbine fall into a different category than the issues I’ve encountered with most other dropper posts. Almost every other dropper I’ve used has worked well right up until the day that it didn’t, at which point, it needed a complete rebuild or replacement. The Turbine, however, has a couple of bothersome idiosyncrasies, but thus far nothing that requires major service.
I’m still undecided if that’s better. I have to fuss around with the Turbine more often than I’d like, but having to send other posts in for warranty work sucks, too.
Bottom Line
The Race Face Turbine brings an innovative design to the table, and that design solves many of the problems that are common sources of failures in other dropper posts on the market. The Turbine still has a few quirks, and although none of them are catastrophic, they’re certainly annoying.
Given that the Turbine is firmly situated in the upper echelons of dropper posts in terms of price, it’s tough to accept anything less than a perfectly functioning post. For the moment I’m not ready to call the Turbine a winner, but Race Face is reportedly already working on fixes to the cable tensioning issue, and if they can work out those kinks, the Turbine will be a tough post to beat.