The theory was that the elastomers would provide a nice bit of ramp up as the fork was pushed deep into its stroke. The best-selling forks of the day-the RockShox Judy SL and Manitou SX Ti offered a stodgy 2-and-a-half inches of travel and still had elastomers in them, which were as supple as Crayola crayons. The big players were producing forks with 26- and 28-millimeter stanchions, wispy crowns and internals that were woefully under gunned. The Z1 looks ‘normal’ by conventional standards, but that’s only because it was freakishly ahead of its time by a good decade or so. The Z1 Bomber was heavy, ridiculously plush and built like a brick shithouse. Marzocchi’s engineers had received the same memo as everyone else, but with the Z1 they essentially doused that memo in gasoline, lit it on fire, went on a bender and woke up the next morning with a hangover and this mutant lovechild of a fork. In 1997, Italian suspension manufacturer, Marzocchi, unleashed the Z1 Bomber. Suspension manufacturers understood this-they’d all got the same memo, so to speak-and they made forks accordingly. People didn’t want a heavy, plush fork that bobbed and slowed them on climbs they just wanted to take the edge off bumps. Why? It was the `90s and mountain biking was all about racing a 23-pound hardtail uphill in your neon sausage suit. Early suspension forks were lightweight, flexy and not very good at eating bumps.
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