Full Details Released: Specialized's Brand New Enduro

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The new Enduro is a ground-up reinvention of the bike that created the genre. And this time around, it boasts a massive 170 millimeters of travel, front and rear, that you can pedal all damn day at an unholy clip. You’re looking at a bike that mobs down the nastiest descents at what should be terrifying speeds—with utter calm. It’s a radically new machine. New chassis, new suspension layout, new geometry, and more travel. More to the point, this new Enduro is fast. It’s faster descending. Faster climbing. It’s fast, fast as.... well, you get the idea.

Less Hang-Up, More Speed

If speed is your objective, square-edged bumps are your enemies. They cause your rear wheel to hang up momentarily on impact, which you feel as a sudden backwards yank on the pedals. The impact your suspension should be absorbing is instead transferred to both you and your frame. You wind up more tired and a lot less fast.

Taking inspiration from the new Demo, we moved the Enduro’s main pivot forward and raised the bike’s instant center, which minimizes rear wheel hang-up by giving the bike a more-rearward axle path in key stages of the wheel travel. Impact energy is transferred into the suspension, where it belongs, instead of into you. Voila, you just got faster.

You can overdo the whole rearward axle path thing. We wanted the Enduro to be faster across the widest range of conditions possible, and this means achieving the right balance of suspension characteristics.

Smoother Suspension Start to Finish

We wanted to increase both small-bump sensitivity and, at the other end of the travel spectrum, improve the bike’s big-hit performance. In another big nod to the new Demo, we tweaked the leverage curve, increasing its progressivity. That change makes the Enduro more supple early in its travel. The extra progressivity also gives the Enduro a nice ramp at the end of its stroke, so you don’t blow through your travel when you come up short or plow into something massive. Smoother, more controlled suspension, from start to finish.

Could we have reached that same suspension feel with the previous design? Yes, we could. The stand-over height, however, would have been higher, as would the bike’s center of gravity. The new design gives us more flexibility in tuning the suspension feel and helps us place the weight lower on the chassis while keeping standover height lower. And all of this adds up to more maneuverability and control on the trail.

Every Pedal Stroke Delivers

The Enduro rips—not just when you’re plowing through chunky terrain with your feet fixed at 3 and 9 o'clock, but also when it’s time to get on the gas and pedal out of a corner or sprint through a flat section. That’s easier said than done—particularly when you’re talking about a rig that’s packing almost as much travel as a downhill bike.

The Enduro’s new design raises the bike’s instant center which, in turn, boosts its anti-squat value by 40% (over the previous Enduro) holding gear combination, wheel size, and rider weight constant. That increase in anti-squat brings a higher level of pedaling efficiency to the Enduro — even in its latest, longer-travel form. What’s more, the Enduro’s new design maintains a more consistent degree of anti-squat (and pedaling efficiency) no matter what gear you’re in or where you are in the travel. Or, to be less geeky about it, you stomp on the pedals and the new Enduro moves a hell of a lot quicker than any bike with this much suspension has a right to move.

Low + Stable = Quick

Low is fast. That is, a lower center of gravity makes you more stable at high speeds. The Enduro new linkage places shock mass as low and centered as possible on the frame, giving the bike an incredibly planted and confident feel.

Custom-Tuned Suspension

Instead of choosing from a handful of standard shock-tune options, our in-house suspension-tuning team develops custom shock tunes, perfectly paired to each bike’s kinematics. We call this Rx Tune and while it’s not the easy way to build a suspension bike, it’s worth it. You feel Rx Tune as perfectly-balanced suspension. More control of our suspension tuning gives you more control on the trail.

Balanced Chassis Stiffness

We didn’t set out to make the stiffest bike possible — that bike would be a poor-handling, tooth-rattling nightmare. The objective isn’t maximum stiffness, it’s balanced stiffness. If the front-end is too flexy, the bike steers poorly. If the rear-end is too stiff, it won’t track well in rough corners and will hammer the living hell out of you on technical descents—no matter how much suspension you’re rocking.

We tuned the Enduro’s carbon chassis to provide just the right balance of stiffness, front to rear. We even go so far as to create unique, Rider-First lay-up schedules for every frame size, so that every Enduro offers the same stellar ride quality whether it’s a diminutive S2 or a sprawling S5. End result? We hit that stiffness sweet spot with a front-end that steers precisely and a rear-end that tracks smoothly and accurately.

On average, the rear-end on the new Enduro is 12% stiffer than that of the previous bike (comparing 29er Enduro to 29er Enduro). The front-end stiffness remains the same.

Fast Starts with Fit

Back when people still thought 29-inch wheels just made every long-travel bike shittier, we rolled out the first Enduro —the bike that proved conventional wisdom dead wrong. A lot of that boiled down to nailing the geometry. The new Enduro takes that concept several steps further.

We gave the Enduro the long, low, and slack treatment to give the bike a more centered and balanced feel, improving your control on steep descents and at speed. And while we were at it, we steepened the seat angle to improve the bike’s pedaling position and shortened the seat tube to make room for longer- travel dropper posts. The result is a bike that handles predictably and saves your ass when you bite off more than you can chew.

Last, but not least, we brought Style-Specific Sizing to the new Enduro, allowing you to choose your frame size based on your riding style, instead of your crotch height. Want a more playful, shorter wheelbase? Size down. Want more stability at speed? Size up.

Big Wheels, Big Speed

Bigger wheels maintain momentum better than smaller wheels — particularly over technical terrain. More momentum, in turn, equals more speed. That’s why the new Enduro rolls exclusively on 29-inch wheels. The Enduro marries 170 millimeters of suspension travel with bigger wheels in a package that’s crazy fast. There’s definitely a place for 27.5 wheels in our mountain line, but for this iteration of the Enduro, 29-inch wheels are the perfect match.