One Trail Bike To Rule Them All - Specialized Stumpjumper 15 Review ｜ 2025 Pinkbike Field Test

Big wash on the old front. This trail is rough as guts. We're here at the Whistler Field Test and this is the Specialized Stumpjumper 15. The alloy version. There's a carbon version as well, but the carbon versions don't allow you to run a cable actuated drivetrain. On this one you can. The bike has 145 millimeters of rear travel, courtesy of this Genie shock, developed in conjunction with Fox. Specialized and Fox teamed up, did some interesting things for that shock. It's got 150 millimeters of front travel, 29 inch wheels, and it weighs in at 36 pounds. Specialized says that this is the one trail bike to rule all trails. We'll see if that's actually the case in the full review, but for now, let's start off with some initial ride impressions. Feels pretty normal bike, going super deep into the stroke. This bike just feels a very bicycle shaped bike. Okay, so that deep feeling is feeling less horrible when you got some proper shunder to get through. This trail is rough as guts. God, this bike's so soft and that sounds like a purely good thing. Yeah, I don't know if I want this bike to hold me up a little bit more maybe, but it does seem to like, once you get your weight on the rear, it really accelerates out of stuff. Yeah, it feels like you say, oh, it doesn't use all the stroke unless it really needs to, but then you've got so much force in the end part of the stroke. Feels good, and it is a comfortable bike, but it sometimes feels like that part where it hangs up. Then once we get the front washed a bit, I mean, hang up's probably a strong term. Tell you what though, bang for buck, immediately, this is pretty good. All this ability, a long chassis can give you, can suddenly feel like a bit of a curse as you're leaning the bike over and you feel that extra final here or there, that feels pretty good to me. All right, those are our first impressions of the Stumpjumper. Let's get into our more in-depth thoughts with some questions. I think actually I did the first ride on this one. I can't really remember what I said about it, such as my recall. What did I say? You said, soft, deep, and easy. Heavens, now I remember. Yeah, I think a lot of that comes down to the shock setup, and that's something we experimented with during the review. This is a proprietary shock from Specialized called the Genie. You get three wishes. Yeah, you're going to rub the lamp, maybe not proprietary, but specific to the bike. You can run the bike with other shocks, but it's optimized for this one. Yeah, super linear in its stock setting, but then with a little ramp at the end. That was the overwhelming sensation, was derived not necessarily from the geometry, but from the shock, at least initially. Yeah, and what that shock does to geometry, I think, because you're sitting into the bike a lot more. Let's get into the questions. We'll start with climbing. All right. First question. We've got, this is the heaviest and cheapest bike on test. Does that hold it up on the climbs? I think, when Specialized tend to just do a really good job of putting bikes together, right? They tend to, yeah. This, I mean, it doesn't ride like a particularly cheap bike. There were certain little things, the contact points, maybe, but overall, I thought it's a very easy bike, both on the ups and the downs, but to me, it felt that sort of middle ground geometry. It felt like it tracked really well, loads of grip from the race shock. What did you feel? I think it climbs well. Having ridden the carbon version, I didn't find that the alloy version was like a dog on the climbs. I think it is heavy for a 145 mil bike, but you really only noticed it when you're picking it up over something or like walking up a steep pitch. Pedaling it, I didn't feel that way. I think it has a lot of grip and because of the way that the shock kind of seats you into the bike, you don't feel like you're working a lot more, you're just kind of like humming over stuff. What's the next question? Second question kind of plays into that. Does the shock play into the climbing? Well, that's it because a lot of times when we, you know, if you hop on this bike and you didn't know how much travel it had from the shock feel, it feels a lot deeper and plusher than most 145 mil bikes typically would. I think that if you're on that sort of like climb where you're hunting for grip, the stock genie setup with that very fluttery mid-stroke can actually really help you find that grip all while giving a platform that is, well, like a chassis that's quite stable. Matt spoke a bit about sort of going quite deep, like a bit of lurching. Yeah, I think he had issues with like pitching the bike back a bit, but you can counteract that with a slightly different spacer setup in the shock or even just running less sag. I think that that's something people will play with. To me, it's funny that Specialized is almost exclusively talking about that shock action as a descending characteristic, like, oh, it's going to descend like a bigger bike, which is true. It also climbs, I think, in a usually beneficial way like a bigger bike too, where you do have like a bit more rear wheel traction and it kind of just undulates through things. And this bike does have a climb switch. It does. Which you will be using intentionally or otherwise, because you tend to lock it a couple of times in descending, at least we found it. Yeah, there's like a spring-actuated climb switch that seems to be sprung the wrong way, so it wants to close. And I ended up just using a bread tie to keep it open. And I'm going to get into it and see if I can like flip that spring around or something, but it is kind of counterintuitive the way that it wants to close. Absolutely. Anyway, question number three. The BB is quite low, regardless of the geo position on this bike. Does that affect climbing? Same goes for seat angle. Yeah, it doesn't feel necessarily like a bike where you're really kind of on the front wheel, kind of high up and perched, you know, trekking. That said, I find that with, I don't know, with even these low bottom brackets, you tend to kind of tune in relatively quickly. It doesn't feel like it, it sits a bit deeper, but it's not, it doesn't feel like it's scraping the ground. What did you feel? Yeah, I found the same. I think Matt was the one who was kind of commenting most on pedal height with this bike. To me, shy of any extremes where the bottom bracket is very high, I find that with any bike I'm like planning my pedal strokes and kind of considering that, you know, I didn't find that like I was hitting the chain ring on climbs, and I think that's where you'd start to be like, wow, this is extreme. But in some ways, it's got quite a similar deep feeling to the Rocky Mountain. However, I would say the Specialized on climbs doesn't feel like the Rocky, you feel so low because you're almost sat on like the wall of support. It's more predictable too. Yeah. You're like, okay, I know it's going to settle in here where the Rocky would kind of like drop out from under you sometimes. Yeah. But then seat angle, I think, you know, the effective seat angles on the sizes are fine. The actual is quite slack on this bike, and depending on your seat height, that starts to play a role. Counterintuitively, like I've ridden the S4 and S5 of this bike, it almost felt more annoying on the larger size, I think because the top tube gets quite long at pedaling height, where the S4 I found fit me really well on climbs, and it's just like happy to sit on top of the bike and motor up stuff. And the last thing I'd like to just comment on regards to the bottom bracket height is as we'll get into the descending section, this is a really adjustable shock, and that really does, to me at least, really affected ride height when I went to a setting that I'd rather, I preferred for descents anyway. So it kind of is like a, it's almost like a double-edged sword. You know, the feeling that you chase for descents can kind of come back to you on the climbs for good and for bad, and we'll get into that. Time to get into the descending. I'm going to hand you these. Sweet. So, my time to shine. For the descending, what's the overall suspension feel? I think your first impressions hold true to the way that I've had the bike set up. It's very soft, feels like it wants to ride deep. I find it reacts really nicely to consecutive hits in the way that you have so much rear wheel movement, but you kind of expect it to do what it does every time. I didn't find it was jarring. Yeah, I mean, fundamentally, when talking about the suspension feel of the Stumpjumper, it's really important to, well, I think if we judge specialised on what they were trying to do, which is probably give a bike that felt like it had more than 145 mil and was very adjustable, then it is a massive success. However, if we actually look at sort of, at least my real world experience of it, it absolutely, in its stock setting, it managed to give a bike that is amazing at taking repeated hits, you would never believe it had 145 mil. It's on par with some, you know, that sort of fluttery mid-stroke or maybe a longer travel enduro bike. However, it tended to have like a bit of ramp at the end of the stroke, which became really apparent when going through rough terrain, especially when using the brakes. Yeah, you start to pack into it. Yeah, and you felt like you were hanging up, and so then you say, well, this is perfect, I can remedy that with the adjustment. So it comes with one out of four of these spaces for the stock setup. You go to, say, three out of four, like I did, and yeah, you get a lot more of a smoother transfer to the end stroke, but then it loses all of its charm and its activity in the middle of the stroke. And it's like, it feels, I don't know, I mean, Specialized, like I said, they've done a really great job for their goals, but this separate shock, honestly, did it have the best shock performance on test, to my mind, no. I think that suspension characteristic depends quite a bit on how you ride the bike, like what your mannerisms are. I think if you're someone who presses into the bike quite a bit, it exacerbates those problems. I think if you have more of a lighter, you're trying to pick up over rougher sections and then aim for these contact patches where you can gain grip and then flutter over to the next thing, I do think it really benefits that ride style. And perhaps there's an element of like, that's more what I aim to do, or that's just how I've learned to ride because I've ridden this bike a bit more. But I think it's an odd shock and bike in that way, where it's not going to work for everyone. If you're like really trying to plow, you're going to have to run more of those spaces, I think. Yeah, and I'm definitely in that category of heels down, eyes up, hit things. It's just like, it's a very good way to ride, I don't think. And that's my point here, is there's not a right way and a wrong way to ride, both work quite well. But to my mind, it's not necessarily just the leverage ratio that's going on here. I would love it if, and we've actually seen it coming out with our e-bikes now, if there was some compression adjustment, just give us just a little bit more. It's like, it's not necessarily where you get to, but it's the speed that you get to there. And I think you could then experiment running less of those spaces to get something that's still fluttery, and then you can tune it out with low speed. I feel like it's the speed of the axle. Yeah, yeah, this is true, because it's, if you could control the rate at which it was moving a bit more, that would be nice. I really enjoy how much it moves, but there are moments where you start to feel like, it's not even packing in so much, it's just like, accelerating so much, you start to feel like you're bouncing off the bottom of it. So before we move on, fundamentally, has Specialized done a good job on this shock? I think it's cool. Yeah, it's cool. Yeah. Sweet. In my mind, the way I keep thinking of it is, it's a very good first step. I don't know that it's like a fully solved system yet. Yeah, I mean, we'll probably talk about this more on the round table, because we could go on for a long time. Yeah. But it's definitely worth playing with setup, should you end up with a Specialized. And it is a bike with lots and lots of good things to say about it. Let's talk about its geometry a bit. What was your favorite geometry position? I have played with everything, like the headset cup, negative one, plus one, all the flip ship orientation. I like the most bone stock, neutral headset, high BB. I quite like the position of the low bottom bracket in terms of the body position, but I prefer the ride characteristics of the high bottom bracket. I'd be really curious to go sort of low bottom bracket, and then steepen up the head angle. Yeah, I like that setup. It's fun in trail areas where you're not too worried about hanging up the BB on stuff. If you have good clearance, that's a really fun setup. And for me, part of the reason I like that neutral setting is I kind of enjoy how low the bike rides, given the genie shock and everything. It's a real package deal, hey? Yeah, like the geometry, the dynamic geometry changes quite a bit because you're sitting into the bike more than you'd expect. So they've reduced the travel versus the Stumpy Evo. Does it feel like it? I owned one of those older aluminum Stumpy Evos, like the golden retriever bike that you see on every trail everywhere. I think this is a more capable bike. I think that it's doing more with less. And do you think we'll see a resurgence of the Evo somewhere down the line? I would assume so. Because in some ways, this is a really good way to offset the needs of the longer travel trail bike with the people that want the shorter travel trail bike. Right. I think what loses out here is that old Stumpjumper, like the, what was it, like 130 mil travel? More of a pedal focused kind of snappy bike. I don't think that you can make this bike feel that way if you stuff that shock full of spacers and maybe even increase your air pressure a little bit. I think then it starts feeling a bit more like that snappy, pedally bike. But inherently, it's much more like the old Evo. But also it does set up, should they want to go down the Evo route, it sets them up very neatly for tackling the enduro issue they're having currently where there seems to, you know, rumors and patents filed for new enduro. We're not quite seeing it, don't know what's going on there, but it kind of could occupy that space. Cool. So what's one word to sum up the handling? Dario, I have a problem summing up anything in one word. So I'll let you have a run at this one. Okay. Predictable? Predictable. It's very easygoing. It feels like it hasn't got the over the front feeling of something like the Transition. At the same time, it doesn't have the high up front feeling of something like the Bonson. So it's a really nice, if there's enough bike in front of you to feel very safe, but not so much that you somehow feel like you need to chuck it down really steep stuff to make it feel very alive. I'd say it's an easygoing, composed bike. But then you can. What I liked about this bike is that you can kind of toss it into anything and know that you're going to have a comfortable catch. It might not always be the most composed through rough things. I think bikes with a bit more damping kind of carry their weight a bit better through that. But you can just know that there's a safety blanket to some things. I don't know how else to describe it, but it feels safe. It does feel safe. I'd say the one, whilst I completely agree, and not to go too much into shock again, but there is sometimes a feeling of you can fall so fast, should you be, but basically it almost feels like the front goes lighter. Oh, I see. If you're caught on the rear. Only through like really choppy tech, but again, a bit more damping and maybe that could have been remedied. In some ways, it's just classic specialised. It's well executed. It's got quite a wide sort of net for a lot of different riders. And as we've seen in recent years, they're really going down this adjustability route. And it is, you know, maybe not compared to the Rocky in terms of the most adjustable bike, but in terms of a blend of useful adjustments and being able to tune the shock feel, it covers off a lot of bases. I love Rocky's reach adjust. I think that that's the one thing that Specialized is missing out on here. Can you explain the difference? So like they both have an unusual headset to allow for some sort of adjustment. Rocky's is oval shaped to allow for plus or minus five millimetres of reach. And Specialized's is kind of like a concentric tilt that allows for plus or minus one degree of head angle. To me, I think the reach fit is like a more meaningful difference for riders than... It becomes about fit and not about ride dynamics, but making the bike fit for the person. And an angle, or sorry, a degree of head tube angle change is pretty significant. I think you kind of would want to be somewhere between those degrees as opposed to a full sweep. So that's what the Stumpjumper is like to ride, but what's it like to live with? Well, let's tune in with Pinkbike's Mike Kazimer. We're here in the garage with a Stumpjumper 15. We're going to go over what this bike is like to live with. We'll start off with the geometry adjustments. Those are easy to make. A little flip chip here on the chainstay. It also comes with cups, allows you to adjust the head angle. Those are simple adjustments. Don't need a ton of mechanical know-how to make them. So that's a good score on the livability index. We did notice some creaking from the frame. These bolts, just got to keep an eye on them. It's been pretty dusty, pretty dry. This bike's been ridden hard, but that is one thing to keep an eye on. Other things, really good in-frame storage. Specialized, one of the originators of that. This one works well. It's really cool to see the tool on the outside also. One of our filmers, he doesn't like in-frame storage at all, so he was really happy to see the tools on the outside of the bike. But here you get kind of best of both worlds. This opens really easily, tons of room for things, but then you got your multi-tool right there. Quick, easy access. Other things to note, the cockpit, a little bit on the cheaper side. The bike also is not the most expensive, but just kind of the bar and stem, pretty basic stuff. But again, concessions need to be made to hit those price points. Final note, as far as livability goes, dropper post does have a 180 dropper post. Some of us would have liked to have a longer one, something you can swap out, but it'd be cool if all the bikes had long dropper posts that could just have the height adjusted. Another point when it comes to what this bike's like to live with, the shock. There's been a lot of talk about it. Some people think it's proprietary. It's not. What I mean is you don't need to run the shock on this bike. Say for some reason it did have an issue and need to go in for service, it'll fit any standard shock that has these dimensions. So yeah, just something to keep in mind. It's not proprietary, it's a little special partnership between Fox and Specialized, but there's other options out there. As far as the overall livability score goes for the Stumpjumper 15, I'm going to say it's pretty easy to live with. Doesn't need any special tools, the adjustments work, overall well thought out, nicely made frame. Now we're going to toss it back to the guys inside and see what they have to think as far as the pros and cons of the Stumpjumper 15. That was Pinkbike's Mike Kazimer with the livability score, but let's get into some pros and cons. I'm of a pretty sunny disposition, so I'm going to go for the pros. Fundamentally, things that can be really apparent to you when you hop onto the bike is that this bike feels quite simply like it has more than 145mm of travel and is really, really sensitive, especially in its stock spacer setting. It is very adjustable, which is a real plus. And to be honest, the geometry and balance of the bike is just kind of an easy rider. I think where it puts your weight is where a lot of people are going to find the right balance between being able to push on and have a lot of grip on the front and also feel nice and safe. I think going down the cons route, you can't get around the fact that this is a very heavy frame. I think this is the cheapest bike on test, therefore the parts kit might be a bit heavier than some of the others, but inherently the aluminum frame is a bit heavier. Other cons, I think you're going to have to spend a bit more time with shock setup if you want to get exactly what you want out of the bike, as you said. And you might not even get what you want. Yeah, depending on who you are, maybe you don't even get what you want. For me, I found it and I was lucky that it was closer to stock, but to maximize things, you're going to have to play with that setup a bit more. I think the final con is it feels, as you said, like a bigger bike. And maybe for some, they want that more reactive, kind of snappy feeling out of a trail bike. And where you can set the shock up and set the bike up to feel that way with the Stumpy, it's not where it wants to be. I think it is this more capable thing that kind of errs on the longer travel spectrum. So who's this bike for then? It can be a lot of things. I think you can build it as a mullet, full 29er. It's got all the adjustability. The shock itself is quite adjustable. This is sounding dangerously close to nuanced stereo. We want a clear verdict. It's an adaptable bike for someone who wants something that maybe is a good one bike. I would say the beauty of a Specialized is just, again, just the wide range it gives. You can give this bike to someone that's their first mountain bike, and they're going to think it's really good. They're going to find it easy to ride, easy to get on with. Similarly, you can give it to someone that absolutely slashes bikes, and they're going to find it probably has a lot of the adjustability and trends that they want. Again, Specialized have done this, made a bike that is a true all-rounder. And I would say it's kind of its greatest strength of who this bike for is it is not for anyone in particular. Right. Yeah. It doesn't feel like it's aiming at one specific corner. It's very much this wide net, works for a lot of different purposes, works for a lot of different people. Absolutely. Thank you very much for tuning in to our review on the Specialized Stumpjumper 15. Now, if you want to follow all the field test content, we've got loads coming out, including, of course, Huck to Flat. Don't forget to subscribe and get in the comments. Let us know what you think about shock setup. Should you be expected to fettle to get the dream performance, or should it be good right from the box? Thanks, guys, and we'll see you next time. Bye.