The mechanism, the data, and what changed in Sidekick 2.0.
The short version. When your suspension compresses, the chain gets pulled tight and yanks backward on your cranks. A timed pusher inside the Sidekick freehub holds the pawls clear of the ratchet while you coast, so there's nothing engaged for the chain to pull against. The original Sidekick launched in September 2024 with the video below. Sidekick 2.0 arrived in April 2026 with the same mechanism, magnets in place of springs, a 9 degree setting, and a lower price of entry. This post covers both.
What is pedal kickback?
As the rear suspension compresses, the swingarm rotates and the distance from the chainring to the cassette grows. The chain follows the swingarm. It pulls on the derailleur cage, and it pulls on the cranks.
That pull is pedal kickback, and it does three things:
It stiffens your suspension at the exact moment you wanted it to move.
It sends vibration and shock up through the pedals into your legs, which is fatigue you feel at the bottom of a run rather than at the top.
It stops the rear wheel tracking the ground, which costs you traction.
It happens on every full-suspension bike, and most riders blame something else for it. The harshness you thought was your shock, or the dead feel when the trail gets rough, is often the chain pulling on the cranks.
The problem is real enough that other brands have redesigned entire frames around it. A high pivot with an idler reduces how much the chain grows through the travel, but it can't take the pull away altogether.
Why a slow-engagement hub doesn't fix it
The usual workaround is a hub with a wide engagement window, so the chain has some slack to pull through before it reaches the cranks. But it helps less than it sounds like it should.
A conventional freehub holds its pawls against the ratchet at all times. At 15 mph, a hub with 1 degree of engagement passes more than a thousand engagement points every second. Each one is a chance for the ratchet to catch and send chain force back into the suspension.
A 10 degree hub has a bigger window, but engagement can happen anywhere inside it. The pawls might catch at half a degree or at six, depending on where the parts happen to be sitting when the chain pulls. Over hundreds of engagements a second, the kickback is more random but still there.
Sidekick takes a different route. The pawls leave the ratchet completely while you coast, so the deadband is the same size on every hit, and nothing inside it can catch.
How the Sidekick stops it
Inside a Sidekick hub is a pawl pusher timed to the ratchet ring.
While you coast, the pusher holds the drive pawls retracted, fully clear of the ratchet. When the suspension compresses and the chain pulls the cassette forward, there's nothing engaged for it to pull against. The cassette turns and the crank doesn't.
Start pedaling and the pawls drop in under torque. The free rotation before they engage is the deadband. Stop pedaling and the pusher lifts them clear again the instant the torque comes off. Only the single light pusher pawl stays in contact, to keep the timing.
None of that sounds hard when you read it. Fabien Barel of Canyon CLLCTV says...
It's not a simple evolution. We're talking about more of a revolution. It always looks simple when it's finished, but it's been a real engineering challenge.
Fabien Barel, Canyon CLLCTV
Retracting the pawls was never the hard part. Indexing the pusher precisely to the ratchet ring was, and it took many years. Greg Thrash, our IP director, puts the prototype count at about fifty. George Dubois, our director of engineering, describes how the last tolerances were found: "Using the race team feedback, and just their accelerated wear, we were able to see that if we were off by 0.01 mm it wasn't working. So we had lots of part swapping going on in the pits, lots of late nights."
The development post tells the whole story.
Three deadband settings
The deadband is adjustable without tools. On the original Sidekick the ring was marked SHORT, MED, and WIDE, at 12, 15, and 18 degrees. Sidekick 2.0 moves the range to 9, 13, and 18 degrees on Sidekick and Sidekick Pro. The gravity-focused Sidekick GR keeps 12, 15, and 18.
More deadband gives the suspension more freedom. Less gives you quicker engagement. The 9 degree setting exists because trail riders asked for it. It feels close to a conventional fast-engagement hub, and it still removes kickback at the start of the travel, which is where the harshness comes from.
| Setting | Best for | What it feels like |
|---|---|---|
| 9 degrees | Trail, all-mountain | Snappy engagement, kickback absorbed at the start of the stroke |
| 13 degrees | All-mountain, enduro, E-MTB | The balanced default, isolation across most of the travel |
| 18 degrees | E-MTB, downhill, gravity | Maximum isolation, the most chainless feel |
Short-travel bikes benefit as much as or more than long-travel ones. Many trail and all-mountain frames run higher anti-squat, which means more chain growth through the travel, so there's more kickback for the hub to remove.
Most riders find the setting that suits where they ride and leave it there. The change takes seconds at the trailhead. You may want to experiment to find your ideal setting, or adjust it for a ride or trip where you'll be spending most of your time going downhill.
What we measured
We put data acquisition on test bikes, and two numbers stood out.
Riders spend 50% more time in the mid-stroke, which is the part of the travel where the suspension does its best work. The bike feels like it has more travel, because more of the travel it has is actually working.
Crank acceleration drops 21%. That's the kickback itself, measured.
There's a third effect that's harder to put a number on. The suspension stays active while you're hard on the brakes, and none of it needs a shock retune.
The clearest demonstration of kickback is the drop test in the video, ridden by Remy Metailler. Two bikes, one without a Sidekick and one with. On the left the crank spins under compression. On the right it stays still.
What riders say
Riders kept reaching for the same comparison: it feels chainless. One of them has actually raced a chainless run and won.
The new Sidekick hub kind of makes my bike feel like it did in Leogang when I won that race without the chain. Getting traction in corners and stuff, without having to hear any noise or chatter.
Aaron Gwin
Gwin is talking about the run at Leogang where his chain snapped out of the start gate and he won anyway. It's the most famous chainless run in downhill, and it's the closest thing the sport has to a controlled experiment in what a bike does when the drivetrain stops fighting the suspension.
Our hub is an attempt to give riders that on purpose, with the chain still on.
The other riders in the video get at the same thing from different angles. Remy Metailler calls it the single best update he's made to his bike. Louise Ferguson of Intense Factory Racing noticed the speed first: "It rolls faster than any hub I've come across." For Patrick Meen, lead mechanic at Canyon CLLCTV Pirelli, it's the way the bike works its linkage properly, that no-chain feel. Ronan Dunne tried to put a number on it and landed on 25% less vibration coming into him as a rider. Dakotah Norton kept it shorter: "It's so fast you won't know where to store all your medals."
Two things that come free
Because the pawls are fully disengaged while you coast, the hub is close to silent and there's very little left to create drag. Ratchet buzz needs a pawl dragging over teeth, and there isn't one. You hear the tires on dirt instead.
We measured the drag part rather than just claiming it. On a spin-down stand, Sidekick 2.0 showed 88.5% less isolated freehub drag than the DT Swiss 350 DEG DF, which is the hub built to solve the same kickback problem, and 51% less total drag in a complete wheel. The method and the data are published.
What Sidekick 2.0 changed
The video shows the original hub: a steel axle, captive-thread end caps for tool-free service, a replaceable ratchet, and the three-position deadband ring. Sidekick 2.0, launched in April 2026, keeps the mechanism and reworks the parts around it.
Magnets in place of springs. Wire pawl springs were the wear item on the original freehub. 2.0 pushes the pawls with magnets instead, and magnets don't fatigue. Pro models get nickel-plated pawls and pusher, which run with less friction and wear slower.
A 9 degree setting. The most-requested change, covered above.
Lighter and stiffer. Sidekick and Sidekick Pro swap the steel axle for an oversized 17 mm aluminum one. That takes up to 38% off the weight and adds up to 50% in stiffness. The Pro SP comes in at 275g, the lightest anti-kickback hub made. The GR keeps a reinforced steel axle, because downhill, enduro, and E-MTB ask more of it.
Less drag again. Better bearings and seals, with the axial preload backed off, take a further 30% out of the coasting drag. 2.0 is the fastest-coasting hub we've tested.
A lower price of entry. The Sidekick rear hub is £229.95, about half the original's launch price.
The tool-free end caps and the full rebuildability carry over, and every 2.0 hub is covered for ten years. All of them are rated for E-MTB, too. A motor delivers its torque in pulses, and the same isolation deals with those. The drivetrain clatter a motor makes quiets down along with the ratchet buzz.
Flux rims
Because a hub that lets the wheel track the ground asks more of the rim, we built one to match. Flux rims are low-profile, 30 mm inner width, hookless, in carbon or 6069 aluminum. The section is shaped so the rim flexes a little right at the tire contact patch and soaks up the chatter that would otherwise go through the bike into the rider, while it stays stiff side to side. The toughness came first, from the LG1 Race Carbon DH wheels that won World Cup titles. The compliance is what our riders asked for next.
Gwin says the rim gives him a lot better feel of the ground and makes it easier to tell where the traction is. Dunne says it holds a line better, wet conditions included. The wheel system has its own post.
Every Sidekick hub, from Sidekick through Sidekick Pro, Pro SP, and GR, is built on the same mechanism, and every complete Sidekick Flux wheel rides on one. The Sidekick hubs page walks through the range if you'd like to explore and learn more.
