Mountain bikes aren’t race bikes but are designed for off-roading. This means that they aren’t designed to attain a lot of speed. Sure every bike, in fact, every mode of transport is designed to facilitate the maximum speed that its engineering allows.
Mountain bikes are built more towards enduring the rough rocky roads and bumps that you experience while off-roading and provide maximum comfort during that. For that very purpose, mountain bikes are built chunkier and stronger rather than slimmer and faster.
While speed isn’t a strong suit of mountain bikes, at least when put in comparison to race bikes like triathlon bikes and road bikes, there are many methods through which maximum speed can be obtained when riding a mountain bike. So read on to know how to make a mountain bike go faster.
It takes getting used to any type of equipment before you use it to its best capacity. Same goes for mountain bikes. There might be one too many things you might have noticed in the bike that might be potentially slowing you down. These aren’t design faults but are averagely functioning parts that are made to cater to the masses rather than people who like to race or go faster than usual. Because they are not design faults, they can be fixed quite easily and lead to a better/faster riding experience.
Listed below are some ways of tuning your bike to enhance speed and make you go faster, without having to make major modifications.
Guide on how to make a mountain bike go faster
Clean your bike
This might come as a shocker and might look like a bunch of nonsense but it really does affect the speed of your bike. Now I am not going to lie to you and say the weight of the dust affects the speed of your bike because you and I both know that is not true.
What really does make this a factor affecting the speed of the bike is the ability of dirt/dust to get into parts and slowly either impair them or just hinder their functioning. The most evident instance is the fact that when dirt gets into the drivetrain of the bike chain, it affects the way the chain functions. Hence it slows you down. The smoother the parts of the bike function, the easier it is to pick up speed.
Lubricate
This is something that is universal. Lubrication is the solution to almost every bike problem to ever occur. Unless you fall off a hill and your bike breaks into two. Lubrication improves the overall functioning of the bikes and smoothens the components that are responsible for speed and efficiency like the bike chain.
It is a simple concept, if there is no hesitation in the bike chain during the actual riding, your rides will be smoother and thus faster. As opposed to that, if your chain is not lubricated, there might be some sort of traction that occurs between the drivetrain, the bike chain and the gears. This will not only lead to a bumpy, slow ride but it will also lead to more efforts on your end. An easy fix to all bike chain related problems is lubrication.
Lubrication comes with its own downside, which is, attraction of dirt, but that is only a small price to pay for a smoother, faster ride. Make sure that you maintain your bike well by periodically lubricating and cleaning your bike back and forth.
Center of gravity
Now not to turn into a science geek all of a sudden but physics does have a lot to do with bike riding. For instance, if you don’t maintain your center of gravity and keep wobbling, it is, quite obviously, going to take a toll on the speed of your bike.
This has a simple explanation, the energy that you put into riding the bike will have more than one place of absorption. In this case, the energy(manual, kinetic and potential, all of them) that should have been used for picking up speed, gets utilized instead for maintaining balance. It is important that you know how to ride a bike and trust yourself, to attain the full potential of your bike. Once you have that under control, you will notice that you have better and faster rides.
Change your tires
As I previously mentioned, companies and brands that design bikes, design them for the masses and not a particular class of people. Mountain bikes are, for the most part, bought by people who like to go off-roading and ride their bike through hills, as the name so clearly suggests.
In such conditions, it is important that the tires maintain a certain amount of traction to ensure security. For this purpose the tires are made chunky. This has a two fold effect on the speed of the bike. The weight of the chunky tires directly affects the speed of the bike as it is a greater known fact, speed and weight are inversely related. The other factor affecting the speed is traction. Traction is basically the friction between the ground and the tire that helps the bike stay on the ground, not slip all over and throw you off the edge of the mountain. Friction and speed are also inversely related. Hence if you really want to achieve greater speed with mountain bikes, your best bet is changing the tires for slimmer ones with less traction.
This is not 100 percent advisable if you plan on riding your bike on hills or rough terrains. But if you want to modify your mountain bike into a bike that could go faster on concrete pavements, get your tires changed.
Inflate your tires
I think it is pretty clear by now that tires contribute a lot to the speed of the bike and its overall performance. This is quite a rookie mistake and mostly just a case of oversight but you are probably not paying close attention to the air in your tires.
Incorrectly inflated tires whether it be more than the required amount or less, can lead to a lot of things you really should live without while biking, like disbalance, discomfort, decrease in speed, increase in efforts also known as lowered efficiency. If your tires are sort of deflated or running low on air, it will take you 10 times the amount of effort that it would normally take while riding the bike. Therefore slowing you down.
If the tires are inflated more than they are supposed to be, you run the constant risk of the tires exploding while you are trying to build up a speed. And with exploded tires you really can’t expect much speed, now can you? So the best thing to do is regularly check the amount of air you have left in your tires and while refilling the air, make sure you do not go overboard.
The tires bursting and you falling off of the bike into either a busy street or a poison ivy bush is not necessarily the best case scenario.
Loosen your chain
More often than not, the bike chain might be bringing you down. This might be an assembly fault or a loose back tire but if you are having problems with your bike chain, the problem might be deep rooted and will not only affect your speed but also the overall performance of the bike.
There might also be the possibility that the last time you were tightening your chain, you might have gone a little overboard. When you tighten your chain a bit too much, it creates friction between the gear and the bike chain. This could lead to two things, the chain snapping at some point when you try to gain speed or you being unable to gain a decent amount of speed. The fix to this problem is really easy. All you need to do is just bring the back tire towards the front and lighten the tension on the chain.
Fix your brakes
Yes you heard me right, if you think you are putting in a lot of effort and still aren’t getting a decent amount of speed, chances are there is some brake rub going on.
To check if that is the case, all you have to do is invert your bike on a stand and boost the pedals a couple of times. If you sense any hesitation and if the wheels stop spinning after you stop boosting the pedals, the brakes are rubbing against the wheel discs.
This essentially forms a constant pressure on the bike chain which makes it impossible for it to pick up on kinetic energy. Which means no matter how hard you pedal, your chain and tires will not move freely once you have stopped. To fix this, all you need is your trusty old screwdriver. Use the screwdriver to adjust the tension in the brake caliper, this will loosen the brake pads and stop them from rubbing against the brake discs. Once you are done with that, use the same method of assessment, keep adjusting the pressure until you feel like the wheels can move freely without any friction.
Conclusion
These are just some of the ways using which you can achieve a mountain bike that goes as fast as you want it to. Remember that your safety should not be compromised in doing so.
There are also a lot of physical bike modifications that can be made to completely change the way your bike works but as long as you can use these easy ways to increase the speed, why would you choose anything else?