Scott's Genius shows us its pert behind

These are, as far as we can tell, the first pics anywhere of Scott's all-new Genius full suspension bike. And it's every bit as clever as its name suggests…

Designer Peter Denk and his team have been working with Scott for several years now, and the Genius is both a culmination of lessons learnt and a departure from Scotts of years past. For a start, it's a four-bar linkage design, moving away from Scott's trusty single-pivots (there are still single-pivot bikes in the range, though).

The design aim was for the ultimate XC full suspension bike, something that Scott rider Thomas Frischknecht would be happy to race. That aim leads to a whole bunch of requirements that the design had to fulfil. It needed to be light, obviously, with lots of travel for downhills but without being mushy up them. It needed an open front triangle so you can get water bottles in, and a full seat tube so you can move the saddle down properly without fouling the suspension. Plus stiffness, strength, low centre of gravity. Oh, and it had to be recognisably a Scott, and look fast.

And here it is. It's very Scottesque, despite being a completely different suspension design. And it certainly looks fast. So what's so clever about it? Well, there's so much stuff going on here that we barely know where to begin, so we'll deal with the stuff you first see first…

Four-bar linkage looks tidy

The rear suspension is, on the face of it, very similar to common four-bar linkage designs like Specialized's FSR. But the beauty of four-bars is that designers can fiddle around with the positions of the pivots and the length of the links and get the back wheel to move in all sorts of different ways. The way the Genius's rear suspension works is somewhat different to most.

The first thing it's designed to do is to neutralise chain tension effects in every gear. Usually this is something of a compromise. With a single-pivot design you can only put the pivot in one place, so you have to choose which chainring you want it to be neutral under power in. Usually designers put them roughly level with the middle ring, so you get a bit of squat in the big ring and a bit of jacking in the inner ring. Not too bad, but not perfect. A four-bar design lets you put the effective pivot somewhere else, but many four-bars still behave as if they're single-pivots, albeit ones with pivots in places where you couldn't physically put a pivot, like inside the rear wheel.

The Genius, though, shifts the effective pivot about. That's not a new idea - Marin's Quad, Santa Cruz's VPP and other designs do it - but the thinking behind the Genius is a little different. If you've ridden a full suspension bike, you've probably set up the sag on the flat and then noticed that it sags more if you're going up a steep hill. That's because more of your weight is over the back wheel, loading the rear suspension and unloading the front. Ever inadvertently wheelied on a steep climb? That'll be 100% of your weight on the back wheel…

Conversely, descend and your weight goes more over the front, unloading the rear and giving you less sag. What the Genius does is use sag to gauge the riding conditions and position the effective pivot point accordingly. The theory is that if the shock's settled a fair way into its travel then you must be going up a steep hill, so chances are you're in the granny ring and would like an effective pivot low down, in line with the chain. While if the shock's less compressed as it would be on a downward slope, you're probably in the big ring and would like a higher pivot.

So far so good. But the designers wanted more - zero pedal feedback in all gears. Pedal feedback is the result of chain growth as the suspension moves - often the length of the top run of chain between the chainring and rear sprocket varies. If it gets longer, the chain pulls the pedals back. By plotting constant chain length curves in the different chainrings and combining them, they figured out a rear axle path that minimised chain growth in all of them. And it's not just an arc around the bottom bracket… As you can imagine, satisfying the twin requirements of effective pivot locations and axle path was no mean feat, but Denk and his team reckon they've nailed it.

Terrainous!

That alone would be an impressive feat, but they didn't stop there. They designed their own shock, too. The Genius design uses a pull-shock rather than the usual push-shock - the shock gets longer as the suspension compresses. This is quite a smart idea for a couple of reasons. For a start, it means that the shock spends most of its time quite short rather than quite long, giving better bushing overlap and higher stiffness. And second, the shock shaft spends more time inside the shock body, keeping it clean - when it does compress it moves dirt away from the shock rather than towards it.

At first glance, the Scott shock resembles a clarinet or something - it's covered in valves, dials and twiddly bits. It's all to make the three-way lockout work. Controlled by a bar-mounted lever, the shock has three travel modes. Full travel mode is pretty self-explanatory, as is fully locked out. But there's another setting in between the two - Traction Mode. This increases the spring rate throughout the whole travel, turning the bike from a plush bump-eater to a tautly-sprung, racier-feeling bike that retains sufficient suspension for traction on bumpy climbs.

The shock also has a "platform damping" control in the style of a Fifth Element or SPV shock, although Scott claim the transition from stable platform to plush travel is less noticeable on their shock. It's also got a high-flow piston design to avoid compression spiking on big hits, a big air volume for its travel to give a linear feel and a blow-off on the lockout in case you forget to turn it off.

Eek! They put hills in

Think that's enough? There's more… Scott have gone with a hugely oversized 34.9mm seatpost, reasoning that with all that state-of-the-art suspension going on you'd be best of with the stiffest possible link between rider and bike. They're also using a new version of their scandium alloy called Scan2, with all the usual lighter/stronger claims. All the frame tubes are "bio-CAD" designed, an extension of finite element analysis that "grows" the tubes in a computer, fiddling around with the butting profiles and tubing diameters until the FEA shows that the stresses are suitably low everywhere with the minimum of material. Oh, and the rear dropouts aren't dull old forged plates, they're monococque pieces that are claimed to be considerably stiffer and lighter. They certainly look good…

What else? All of the pivot bearings are the same size to simplify spares stocking. There's a smattering of CNCed gussets around the place. And probably some other stuff, but our heads are spinning a bit now.

Scott will be doing three Genius platforms for next year. The RC is a 100mm travel all-out XC race bike with a claimed weight of 2.1kg (4.6lb) for the frame and shock. The MC is a more enduro-biased bike, with 125mm of travel and hitting the scales at 2.4kg (5.3lb). And there's the Contessa, a women-specific version of the RC.

The women-specific Contessa

But enough of all this techno-waffle, you probably want to know how these things ride. We've only had a chance to have fairly short rides on the bikes (although they were in Switzerland in the sunshine, which is some compensation) but first impressions are good. After a bit of light shock fiddling the suspension seems to do everything that's claimed of it. The Traction Mode is particularly impressive up lumpy climbs. We got on better with the RC than the MC - the geometry is slightly different on the two bikes, with the MC having a shorter top tube but with a relatively long stem, leading to some tucking-under issues in the tight stuff, and we never felt we were getting all the travel. A shorter stem and some more time to play with the shock should make a world of difference. The longer RC was an inspiring ride. "Longer" in the world of Scott isn't massively long by some manufacturer's standards, so despite the RC's XC race intentions it's not a hilariously stretched-out bike. It feels planted and flickable at the same time and is impressively lively under power even on the full-travel setting. The RC certainly doesn't feel like a 100mm travel bike until you pile down something rocky, but you're always getting the benefits of the suspension (unless it's locked out, of course…). We liked it a lot.

We'll bring you a full test of the Genius bikes when they become available later this year. There's no firm word on pricing yet, but look for a range of bikes starting somewhere around the £1,500 mark.