Technical - Suspension

In a Sit Ski you no longer have your knees to take the bumps out of a slope. This means you have to set your suspension up before you make a run. If you are free skiing that’s not too much of a problem. You can always stop have a break and adjust if you need to. However in a race you don’t get that chance, you get one inspection slip though of the course where you have to try to remember the gate positions and also decide on your suspension settings. I only got used to this at the very end of the 2008-2009 season and was always surprised when I crashed for no reason. I’d love to say they is a golden rule and a magic setting, but there isn’t, its up to the rider and what they feel conformable with. You have a simple shock absorber between you and the ski, you can adjust two settings, the recoil and the compression.

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Recoil

The recoil is the easiest setting to make, after talking to people who had done this for a lot longer than me it soon became apparent that I wanted the fastest recoil I could have. This means that my suspension would return back to full length as fast as possible. If I didn’t have this, I could go over a set of bumps and the suspension would slowly compress until there was no more travel, at this point a crash was always going to happen!

Compression

Compression is the harder of the settings to get right, only experience helped me get this to a level that I was happy with. The compression is how much force you have apply on the suspension to make it move.

Hard

If you have your compression set too hard there is very little movement, sometimes you want this and I found that racing Slalom I wanted my compression slightly harder than normal. This is due to the rapid turns you are making and not wanted to wait for the suspension to catch up to your movements. But if you set it too hard with no travel and you hit a roller, you are going to take off and get air, as much fun as this is you need to be ready and accept that you will loose a little speed.

Soft

If you have your compression too soft you will find that when you flatten out after a steep downhill your suspension will bottom out, controlling this is difficult and led to me crashing more than a few times. However having the compression a little soft will allow you to ride over a set of rollers without getting too much air and a loosing too much speed.

Conclusion

Any adjustments you make to your suspension will have an effect on how well you ski, some slopes will pay the changes back well and some won’t. You have to find what is right for you. My compression has about 35 different settings; I only used the top 5 and this year I plan to maybe use the top 4. This was advise given to me by a very experienced sit skier, when he said I would only use the top 10-15% of the settings I didn’t believe him, it didn’t take long for him to be proved right.