For its biggest, baddest Enduro ever, Specialized scrapped the hugely successful, yet rather long-in-the-tooth X-Wing frame and began anew. Inspired by the freshly redesigned Demo, the Enduro shares Specialized’s new linkage design, which despite having more Rube Goldberg stuff happening than you’d typically see on a Horst-link bike, is still technically an FSR platform. You wouldn’t know it by pedaling it uphill, though.
That’s because it’s the first Specialized FSR ever made that can genuinely be ridden uphill without requiring a lockout of some kind. While this is not a big brag for some brands, it is for Specialized. Are we saying that other brands have had a leg up on Specialized in the suspension kinematics game? Yes, that’s exactly what we’re saying.
At last, we could leave the shock open without the bike squatting more than Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson on leg day. That would be impressive enough if we were talking about a Stumpjumper ST, but this is an Enduro 29 with 170 millimeters of front- and rear-wheel travel—more than any Enduro before it.
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