The rear shock works like a conventional spring unit but utilizes pressurized air, with the rider able to use a high-pressure pump, stored underneath the seat, to adjust the unit. There is a brilliant feature to help adjust the sag, located in the frame on the left side just about where your knee is. It is a small bubble level. You sit on the bike with all your gear on, look down at the bubble and if it’s between the lines you’re set. Simply add air or subtract air to get the bubble centered. We found the rear to sit a little high on our test unit with the bubble right between the lines so we found a sweet spot and used this as our guide when changing settings between test riders. Don’t be in any sort of rush when making adjustments. The tiny hand pump requires a significant amount of pumping in order to increase preload on the Air “spring”. It is a good idea, it just needs some refining. Another very cool feature is the removable license plate holder. Simply lift off the seat, remove four small allen bolts from underneath the fender, pull on the release cable and viola! Off comes the plate and the turn signals. It’s a fantastic feature for riding in a close course area that will save many broken turn indicators.

We found the suspension to be firm in the initial stroke and bottomed hard at the end of the stroke, we’d like to send it off to Race Tech for some tuning to get that plush initial feeling we love and have the confidence for big hits. We felt the rear Air Damping System has too limited a range of adjustability for our tastes. You either have no compression/ rebound damping or very little. Regardless of this fact the XChallenge tracks extremely well and is very stable at speed. Most people who purchase the XChallenge won’t be slamming through heavily whooped out sections and jumping doubles like we were when we had bottoming issues.