Keeping the rear wheel in contact with the ground has long been viewed as a way to win races. Yes it’s very spectacular when MXers leap hundreds of feet in the air and do fancy loops but if you’re in the air, you’re going nowhere. Once the idea rear suspension was a good thing for off-road motorcycles caught on, the battle was under way to make it work as well as it could.
Most suspension in the early days involved a fork generally known as a swinging arm pivoting on a spindle behind the engine and two hydraulic units connecting either side of the rear wheel spindle end of the fork to the frame. For years this was enough, people played with spring-rates and manufacturers experimented with unit length but in the main things stayed pretty much the same for all of the Fifties and well into the Sixties.
When the scrambles world became the MX world and the European factories took over from the British factories then there was experimentation with damper position to provide maximum travel for the wheel. Shock units were angled at the top or moved up the swinging arm at the bottom, then back again as makers battled in the early skirmishes of the suspension wars where the goal
