The 2019 Specialized Stumpjumper Comp Carbon 29er
Size: Medium
Was £3800 NOW £2500
With Sram NX Eagle 12-Speed
The design goal for the Specialized Stumpjumper was simple – build the ultimate trail bike, one that feels telepathic. And it turns out that this feeling all comes down to stiffness. Think of it this way: when the frame’s telling your hands one thing and your feet another, your brain gets confused with the imbalance and the bike feels unstable. In order to fix this, they had to get to work on dialing-in the materials, shapes, and the layout.
Specialized started by creating their own mountain-specific stiffness test, and then looked at the layout with Finite Element Analysis (FEA) to see where the biggest stiffness improvements could be made. This led to a big discovery: The Large and X-Large frames needed more front-end stiffness while the Smalls and Mediums were just fine. With this information, Specialized were able to create a frame design that was 20% more efficient. And in the end, this proved to be one of the lightest trail frames on the market, today.
When designing the frame with the stiffness targets being a main goal, they developed a radical new sidearm design for the 2019 Stumpjumper. The front-end and rear-end are connected at three points, and the sidearm helps keep all these points super stiff and connected, all while taking about 100 grams out of the rear-end. More explicitly, this minimizes frame flex when the rear suspension is active.
Continuing down the suspension path, both the fork and rear shock get a custom Rx Trail Tune. Suspension performance is highly dependent on frame, wheel, and rider size, so the Rx Tune allows for each bike to land in the middle of the adjustment spectrum, and this gives you the biggest possible range to fine-tune your ride. Another focal point of the tune for the Stumpjumper was matching the suspension characteristics between wheel sizes—we developed a specific Rx Tune for each platform. So, no matter what wheel size you prefer, you’ll get perfectly linear suspension.
Ex Demo bike in medium: Was £3800 NOW: £2500
Blazing Saddles
