Ask The Editors: Is Suspension Sag Eating Up All My Travel?
It would indeed seem that way until you stop to realize one very important reality about riding off-road: Not all fluctuations in terrain stick up. What does that mean you ask? Think about it- when riding alone on a wooded double track, sure you have roots, rocks, stumps, logs and so on sticking up in your path. Your ATV’s suspension is designed to compress over such obstacles and thus absorb their influence before the jarring motion of popping over them can reach you.
The trouble of course is that natural terrain typically contains as many dips, divots, wash-outs and ruts as it does above-ground obstructions. Without sag, your quad would simply fall into these holes as you encountered them.
Sag, put simply, is the suspensions negative travel; or its ability to elongate so as to smooth out the dips and keep the wheels on the ground where traction is optimal. So while it appears running proper sag (the amount the suspension compresses when you climb into the cockpit) is taking away precious suspension travel numbers, it is in fact dividing what travel you do have more evenly between compression and elongation so as to better track through terrain imperfections both above and below ground-level.
We ran a piece on properly setting up your ATV’s sag that can be found here.
