Originally Posted by
PaulRivers
I don't spend much time on racing so I googled it:
https://www.active.com/running/artic...ull-suspension
"...
One thing is for certain: More than a decade after full-suspension bikes started popping up in World Cup cross-country competition—think Henrik Djernis and his BMW-Proflex team of the mid '90 - they're (full suspension) still the exception at the highest levels of cross-country racing."
They may have improved rear suspension but it sounds like hard tail is still usually a hair faster even on super expensive bikes with pro riders, for the most part.
For one, that linked article is ten years old (going by the races it mentions), and suspension design has come a long way since then. If you watch any of the XC world cup races today, you'll see that FS bikes are in large majority. That probably has to do also with the courses becoming increasingly technical. Even the Absa Cape Epic, which is a week long marathon event and has much less technical features than XCO normally does, had only FS bikes in all the top spots.
Anyway, even that 10 year old article finds that FS bikes are faster than HT despite what the perception tells us.