Sram recently sent us the Quarq Shockwiz for testing; in a sense it’s almost like telemetry, only much smaller and simpler. As an overview, it’s a small device that connects to most air sprung forks and shocks and transmits data to your smartphone. The app is designed to use that data to help you better understand and improve your suspension setup. One might ask: How does it work if it isn’t measuring wheel travel/speed physically? Well, because Quarq have put it so succinctly, we’ll quote just them: “suspension displacement could be interpreted from changes in air pressure”
Setup
To start, we connected the hose to the fork with the longer fitting and simply zip tied the Shockwiz behind the crown. There is a solid instructional video for mounting and with forks and shocks right here.
Basically, with the app pulled up on your phone, under the calibration wizard tab, you deflate the fork/shock, cycle the suspension and then add air. Doing this allows the Shockwiz to establish a baseline setting.
You have the option of setting up between 4 different attitudes(tuning styles). Efficient, Balanced, Playful & Aggressive. We picked playful…On our first quick ride, we set our 170mm Lyrik fork up with a bit more pressure/less sag than usual as we were riding with a very heavy camera bag. We were quite curious to see how the Shockwiz would react.
Unsurprisingly, in general the device was telling us to soften up our setup. This makes sense as we were carrying a top heavy loaded pack and running pretty firm suspension.
We didn’t set up our fork too poorly as the Shockwiz didn’t pick up on too much bad behavior. This also made sense as our bike felt quite good albeit a bit harsh.
Lastly, the Shockwiz measures sag as well as events like jumps and bottom outs. We never bottomed out but we also hardly got any time in the air.
We’ll keep you posted with a full review after we get some more time on this rad little device but so far it looks like it would be quite a helpful tool for anyone from a clueless beginner looking for advice on dialing in his setup, to a full time competitive racer trying to find an edge.
Available: February 15th.
Price: TBD
