Fox never stops innovating. We continue to push the potential of mountain bike suspension to give gravity riders and racers the edge whether on the World Cup course, the steepest and most technical local descent, and everything in between.   Podium is designed to be ridden like a downhill fork. No barriers. No hesitation. Complete confidence that your front wheel will hold the line, no matter how fast or how big you push it. All this while keeping your bike in a familiar range of travel and geometry in a single crown package. We designed this inverted fork to get the absolute maximum performance out of our GRIP X2 damper, with every possible gain for smoothness in its travel and confidence-inducing fore-aft rigidity in the chassis.   Oversized Uppers. Overbuilt Crown The biggest edge Podium has over every other single crown fork its incredible fore-aft rigidity. The combination of oversized 47mm upper tubes and a massive generatively-designed crown create the foundation for the stiffest possible chassis approaching that of a FOX 40 letting you power through the roughest and steepest trails with absolute confidence, even at Downhill race speed   Large Diameter Axle Where inverted forks have fallen short in the past is with torsional (steering) stiffness because there’s no arch joining the fork legs. This meant we had to build torsional stiffness into other parts of the fork. The oversized crown has the upper end covered, so the next logical place to add stiffness was where the fork legs join on the lower end.   By using a custom steel 20 x 110mm Boost DH axle (rather than a standard 15 x 110mm alloy axle typically found on single crown forks) we achieved the optimum torsional stiffness for Podium. This was verified with extensive (and blind) testing by our engineers and athletes.    While stiffness can be measured in fore-aft and torsional planes independently, the real-world forces exerted on a mountain bike fork are not isolated to those planes. Having a much higher fore-aft rigidity means the fork will feel much more stable and responsive overall, exactly what riders in this category are looking for   All The Bushing Overlap Bushings are Teflon-lined sleeves that interface between the upper and lower legs of the fork. There are two bushings in each leg, for a total of four in a fork. “Bushing overlap” refers to the distance between upper and lower bushings in each leg. As the fork is loaded fore-aft (such as when running over an obstacle on the trail), that bending force is transmitted through the bushings.   The inverted chassis configuration allowed us to design Podium with a massive 175mm of bushing overlap. That’s 32% more overlap than the 38 and even 7% more than the 200mm-travel FOX 40 DH race fork. This overlap not only contributes to greater fore-aft rigidity, but also gives Podium an unfair advantage with the lowest possible chassis friction, especially when powering through the roughest terrain at high speed when bending loads on the...