Six months on Sidekick, and 4.5 out of 5 from a tester who started out suspicious of the whole idea.
Robin Weaver, BikeRadar's technical editor-in-chief, has heard the pitch before: a component that makes the bike itself ride better. His own description of hearing it again is that his eyebrows weren't just raised; they were "levitating two feet above my head." He gave this one six months to prove it, reviewing the Sidekick hub aboard his long-term Specialized Stumpjumper 15 Expert, and scored it 4.5 out of 5.
The Sidekick rear hub spent that time laced into a wheelset on our Grappler Flux carbon rims, across a variety of terrain, natural singletrack, and steep, rocky descents. When he wanted a reference, he swapped to his own Nukeproof Horizon V2 wheels and rode the same trails back to back. Six months is a long time for a placebo to hold up.
The difference arrived on the first rocky trail, and it was bigger than he expected. In a companion piece about the test, he writes that the hub "makes a marked difference to suspension performance," and that he's "not sure I've ridden anything recently that had the same effect as this."
What it did to the ride
His words for the biggest effect:
The back end of the bike feels suppler, as if you've switched to a higher-volume shock.
Robin Weaver, BikeRadar
It read enough like a setup change that he spent his early rides questioning his sag, wondering whether he was running too much of it. His other comparison is a slow flat: the point where the tire still has enough support to feel stable, but has gone soft enough to absorb the chatter.
The notes stack up from there. The rear wheel "feels more free and more eager to move when you start smashing into obstacles," the handling calms down with it, and traction in roughed-up turns is "easier to come by as an offshoot." In his phrasing, things "feel less rushed and hectic," with more time for what he calls "split-section line-choice decisions."
The Pawl Pusher is the part doing the work. It holds the three main pawls off the ratchet ring while you coast, so the cassette can spin forward without dragging your cranks back through the suspension. That slack is the deadband, and on the hub he rode it comes in three widths: 12, 15, or 18 degrees. You change it by unscrewing the non-driveside end cap and clocking the freehub by hand, which is how "easy-to-adjust 'deadband' setting" made his pros list.
He also offers the simplest demo going for what the hub is doing: take your chain off and roll over the same bumps. "There's less feedback through your feet and the bike overall, and things feel calmer and smoother." The hub approximates that condition with the chain still on.
The coasting surprised him, too. The freehub runs nearly silent, and the hub spins freely enough that "limited drag" is another pros-list entry. On one group ride, coasting in a pack, he kept pace with 29in XC bikes while running a 27.5in rear wheel and heavier, stickier tires. His caveat, and we'll keep it: "this is by no means a scientific measure."
A side note: we recently did get more scientific to quantify the drag reduction. The current Sidekick 2.0 measured 0.179 W of coasting drag at 30 km/h, the lowest of five hubs on the stand, and 51% less total drag than the DT Swiss DEG DF, the other design aimed at pedal kickback.
The rims he wasn't reviewing
The wheelset turned his hub review into a six-month rim test he never signed up for. His audit after it: "After many months of hard and, at times, reckless riding, the rims still look unscathed," with "some lighter scratches here and there." How they ride: "as forgiving as a good set of alloy hoops, but with a little more zip."
The pair he rode, 29in front and 27.5in rear, weighed 2,120g with tape and valves fitted. They arrive pre-taped for tubeless, and his spec sheet lists the rims with a lifetime guarantee.
The one line on his cons list
His cons list has one line in it: "Lag in pick-up can make technical climbs trickier."
The lag lives at the 18 degree setting. On steep climbs with pauses in the pedaling, the hub takes a moment longer to drive, so balancing through crux moves gets trickier, and those moves want "more practice, precise timing and patience."
His fix was already on the hub. At 12 and 15 degrees, "things feel far more natural, almost like riding with a hub with a slower pick-up." The float that keeps the chain from loading the suspension over chatter is the same float you take up each time you restart the pedals. How much you run is the whole question.
For scale: his pros list runs six entries. The cons list is that one line.
What we make of it
This test is what we'd point anybody to, because the strongest material in it is evidence he generated himself: the sag checks, the coasting runs, a rim audit at the end of six months. None of that came from us.
He tested the first Sidekick, where 12 degrees was the shortest setting. The Sidekick 2.0 line that followed opens at 9 degrees, built for riders who want quicker engagement, with kickback still absorbed at the start of the stroke. It's aimed at trail and all-mountain bikes, the same category as the Stumpjumper he rode.
The 2.0 hubs are lighter, too, which a trail build notices, and the upgraded seals cut drag by a further 30 percent over the original. His pros list already gave "limited drag" a line.
He also finished the test with advice we agree with, under the heading "Keep making changes." The deadband is there to be dialed to the terrain, and he found the ride kept changing when he moved it. A photo caption in the companion piece is plainer: he says he'll miss the hub when he has to send it back.
The hub range and its settings are laid out on the Sidekick page.
Hero photo: Scott Windsor / Our Media, from BikeRadar's review.
