Slacker, longer, lower - you've heard it a million times, but this time Specialized mean it. The 63.5-degree head tube angle is built to shred but it's not just the geometry that makes it so capable. The Stumpjumper EVO Carbon 27.5 has been designed with one goal to conquer the gnarliest of trails out there, without a DH bike.
The EVO is for the shredders and the gnarliest trail riders who live for gravity riding. The Stumpjumper EVO can handle big drops, huge kickers, rocks, roots and whatever you throw at it. The EVO uses the same style-specific sizing that's featured on the Specialized Demo. This sizing lets you choose the bike that fits the way you ride, not just by the seat tube measurement like with most bikes, and it narrows things down to two sizes, S2 and S3. These are longer, lower, slacker, and have seat tube and head tube heights that allow you to choose the size that best suits your style and terrain.
The other design goal was simply to build the ultimate trail bike that feels telepathic. It turns out that this feeling all comes down to stiffness. So, when the frame's telling your hands one thing and your feet another, your brain gets confused with the imbalance and the bike feels unstable. In order to fix this, Specialized had to get to work on dialing-in the materials and shapes.
Specialized started by creating their own mountain-specific stiffness test, and then looked at the layout with Finite Element Analysis (FEA) to see where they could get the biggest stiffness improvements. This led to a big discovery: The Large and X-Large frames needed more front-end stiffness while the Smalls and Mediums were just fine. Specialized were able to create a frame design that was 20% more efficient. This proved to be one of the lightest trail frames on the market, today.
When designing the frame with the stiffness targets being a main goal, a radical new sidearm design was developed. The front-end and rear-end are connected at three points, and the sidearm helps keep all these points super stiff and connected, all while taking about 100 grams out of the rear-end. More explicitly, this minimizes frame flex when the rear suspension is active.
Specialized continued down the suspension path with a custom Rx Trail Tune on both the fork and rear shock. Suspension performance is highly dependent on frame, wheel, and rider size, so Rx Tune is used to get each bike to land in the middle of the adjustment spectrum, and this gives you the biggest possible range to fine-tune your ride. Another focal point of the tune was matching the suspension characteristics between wheel sizes - a specific Rx Tune was developed for each platform. So, no matter what wheel size you prefer, you’ll get perfectly linear suspension.
Steps were also taken to make this bike easy to live with. Threaded bottom brackets make a triumphant return, and room was made for up to a 3.0” tyre. You're also free to run whatever aftermarket rear shock you want, since they're using standard metric shocks. The SWAT™ box was also revamped, making it sleeker, lighter, and with more volume. Customisation is furthered with a Flip Chip that lets you to dial-in your Stumpy to your riding style. Switch it from High to Low and it drops your bottom bracket 6mm and slackens the head tube by half-a-degree. Little details also jump out to surprise you, like a newly designed ribbed chainstay protector that makes chain slap a thing of the past and nearly silences the drivetrain. Lastly, Specialized seriously couldn't make cable routing any easier on carbon models. Full tubes can be found throughout the carbon frame, so all you have to do is push the cable and it'll come out the other end. No more lazy loop, hidden stashes of magnets, pokey spokes, or pillows to cry in.
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With its FACT 11m full carbon frame , 27.5 Trail EVO geometry, and 150mm of travel, the Stumpjumper EVO has been purpose-built to shred the most gravity-defying trails.
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The FOX FLOAT DHX2 Performance Elite rear shock keeps Specialized's coveted Rx Trail Tune, while giving you the coil-shock big-hit performance that you know and love.