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Innovate or Die

Reframing Stumpjumper

We pour our heart and soul into every new bike we make. It’s a commitment to improving the ride we’ve been obsessed with since 1974. But some projects are special and some projects the stakes are simply higher. Take the most historic name in mountain biking, the bike that truly started it all. There’s the weight of history, responsibility to uphold a legacy, and an absolute demand to take trail riding to the next level. This is what awaits any team tasked with reinventing an entire class of bike. This is Stumpjumper. No pressure.

The “Ultimate Trail Bike” is no idle slogan. For decades, Stumpjumper has set the bar as the most versatile and capable trail bike on the planet. To take everything that the Stumpjumper is the benchmark — effortless control on flowing singletrack, blistering speed through steep, chunky terrain, and confidence to huck off blind drops — and raise the bar. To do that required us to create the lightest, most efficient, most capable trail bike we’ve ever made.

Simple right?

For this all-new Stumpjumper, it started with the bike’s backbone: the frame. Control, efficiency, durability, and weight savings are all born from the frame itself. Recent breakthroughs in our carbon lab resulted in a new understanding of how shape affects a frame’s performance. Shape, not material, determines the vast majority of a frame’s weight, stiffness, and durability. Thanks to the largest Finite Element Analysis study we have ever undertaken, we’ve optimized the dimensions and radii of the Stumpy’s frame tubes and their intersections, ensuring that every fiber of carbon is delivering the most strength and stiffness it possibly can. When every piece of carbon is truly pulling its own weight, “lazy” material that would otherwise hide in unoptimized corners is totally eliminated.

While material shape delivers the vast majority of a frame’s performance, for a bike like the Stumpjumper we coaxed every last gram of performance out of the frame. That meant utilizing the strongest, most expensive carbon we’ve ever built a mountain bike with. We selected the optimal material for every layer of carbon, all chosen to deliver the maximum performance needed in that region of the frame. This — along with our careful study of shape — is what allowed us to achieve our rider-focused performance targets with the minimum amount of material.

One of the frame’s biggest breakthroughs came from the Flex Stay, enabling us to remove the Horst link to save weight and increase durability while mimicking the four-bar FSR system perfectly. We can manipulate the carbon fiber seatstay’s stiffness to an incredible degree, all based on how we orient the carbon fiber. The result is a tube section that can flex vertically yet be incredibly stiff laterally, recreating a pivot with our Flex Stay.