That simple, hard-packed, one and a half ‘rubbery’ inches really did make all the difference to my riding. Of course, I am referring to the legendary Pace RC35 suspension fork of the early 1990s.

By the time the 1990 World Championships came around, just a handful of the absolute elite were sporting suspension forks – mostly early RockShox. For the vast majority of mountain bikers, it was a fully rigid and wrist-rattling old time to shake through, although that certainly didn’t stop us taking on the gnarly stuff that riders of the moment would demand a long travel trail bike for. It just meant that these sections either turned into skill-building trials, showdowns, crashes, or, for those wise enough to know better, bike carries.

After all, back then, we knew no different. Why would we? When suspension did start to appear in the mainstream, many were reluctant to either dabble with this new and complicated witchcraft or chose to leave such impurities in the soon-to-be inevitable future. Plus, that’s not to mention the cost factor, which was pretty steep back then, or at least in terms of stumping up a third of the cost of a bike for something yet to be understood or proven, which was reason enough to side-step them at the time.

Then came northern soul, of the bike kind

The evolving suspension market was dominated by the US brands RockShox, followed by Manitou, and yet there was something rumbling and a rocking hot on their heels on the trails of the North Yorkshire Moors; from Pace, the creator of Britain’s first truly viable suspension fork, the RC35.

Pace, much like Hope and Orange, who all emerged ‘up north’ in the late 80s-early 90s, was a rider-driven brand with outside sporting and engineering influences. It had been making its epic-looking and wild riding bikes and other bits for a few years, including its much-desired rigid RC30 fork. However, it was the pioneering RC35 suspension fork that, arguably, put the brand on the map.

Sometime in 1992, Pace first launched the stunning and simple RC35 beast of trail smoothing goodness. I’d say it was around 93-94 that I got my first fork, when it came stock on my Raleigh M-Trax. The RC35 went through several evolutions and tweaks over the years, and I went through several of them over time. With its beefy and CNC-engineered crown, rear brace and cantilever brake mounts, this fork had an unholy 40-45mm or so of stacked elastomer “unlockable’ travel (estimates run between them going from around 35mm-65mm through years of evolution), and hand-wrapped carbon fibre legs. It weighed in at a none-too-shabby 1.4kg or so, which was pretty light for the era.

With this design and stack height, there was little need to worry about flipping the frame geometry when switching from rigid forks, which many of us of that era would do on a semi-regular basis.

This may well sound like little more than a pair of padded gloves and a few psi’s worth of bounce to riders these days, but at the time, it was a game-changer for me. That is not to say it enabled me to suddenly take on the unridable at warp speed; more so than anything, it was that it did allow for a margin of bike handling error, save my wrists and bones from the evil beatings, which, in turn, made riding the more extreme stuff that bit easier.

There were many a rumble of the trails of the mid 90s about the burden of the suspension sag, the weight penalty, and how suspension was killing the fine art of bike handling, and to an extent I would agree. However, the benefits far outweighed all of that, by a long old elbow graze and popped wrist (which I had a few times from riding fully rigid on insanely long and rocky rides at speed).

Things sure have come a long way in terms of bike evolution since then, and I do still have a half-seized later-model RC35 lingering in a shed somewhere. In another far-off shed, I also have one of my 90s bikes with a sparking prototype of Pace’s original RC30 fork, which has Merlin titanium legs – of which I think only a handful were ever made (I could be wrong).

As many will know, DT Swiss acquired Pace forks around 2006, although Pace bikes still rumble those hallowed trails up north, piloted by Ardian Carter- aka Mr Pace.

Ironically, or arguably, some of the elastomer-fuelled rocket science (of the era) visions of the RC35 have been part re-incarnated through gravel suspension. They were indeed ahead of their time!

*This is not a tech story, so do excuse any lack of precision detail. It was a long, long time ago.