Technology. Innovation. Disruption. These are words that, for better or worse, have become virtues of the cultural moment we’re living in. And while nations around the world try to outcompete each other for the tools of tomorrow, this pattern is nothing new to mountain bikers.

Our culture is built on technology: the promise that shaving a few grams, adding a bit of stiff ness, or changing a fraction of an angle will make us better riders. And sometimes it does. But as a cohort obsessed with minutiae, we also know you can easily get lost in the weeds, and real-world benefits are harder to come by than hype.

These days, most of us are skeptical about reinventing the wheel. OK, wheel size has changed, but that doesn’t make circles obsolete. Our sport’s history shows we can be sober about one thing: Often, we get things right closer to the beginning of the iterative process than the end. And, on the evolutionary tree of design, sometimes the lower branches are the better ones.

To wit, our rear wheels are back to being small, oval chainrings have re-emerged, handlebars have high rise again, alloy rims are surging on racetracks, and coils have made a full comeback along with downhill bikes. And while these are indeed better iterations than we had in the past, the basic concepts remain the same.

The derailleur is a great perennial example. Put a 2025 SRAM XX T-Type next to a 1990 Shimano XT and, in principle, you’re still looking at the same machine doing the exact same thing. What the intervening years have held is refinement, not revolution. Narrow-wide teeth and servos are slightly different techniques to do what drivetrains have always done: move a chain along cogs.

Belt drives, internal hubs, and internal frame transmissions have yet to meaningfully replace them. Nor has VPP, DW-Link or any other exotic suspension platform totally displaced the trusty Horst-link suspension platform that Specialized first patented in 1996.

The lesson here is that not everything needs to be a Cybertruck, and iterative design is often referential. The first oval chainrings came out in the ’80s, under the banner of Shimano Biopace. For years we joked about them wrecking knees, but it turns out if you rotate the oval 90 degrees they actually work, providing better traction over a lower cadence on steep climbs.

The folks behind Oneup Components figured this out around 2013, when the company first launched as a solution to retrofit old-school drivetrains to one-by. Since then, it’s bridged into making some of the most popular stowable multitools, dropper posts, and handlebars on the market, now even delving into clip pedals and hubs. None of these components are groundbreaking—well, the stowable multitool was when it came out—but all of them represent a very precise aggregate of the best ways we already know for making things.

“Often people will be like, ‘Oh, simple is basic,’ says product-design engineer and Oneup co-founder Sam Richards. “But a lot of times it’s harder for us to make things simple. And we get stuck in quite an iterative loop when it’s easy to make things complicated. We spend a lot of time reducing that down to just what’s needed.”

That means discipline, and looking back in time before looking ahead. For instance, many consider low-engagement hubs more primitive nowadays. But primitive works great—if you do it right.

“We wanted [our hubs] to be super durable and easy to service at home,” Richards says. “And then we went down the route of, ‘OK, we could go for a super-high engagement, but we don’t see the value for everyday riders.’ Like, does it actually improve your ride? Probably not. Is it a lot more expensive? A lot more complicated? More things to go wrong? More difficult to service?”

Spoiler: Yes to all the above.

Likewise, when Oneup first started making carbon bars, the innovation here again was chasing an old feeling. The company sought to mimic the damp, flexible character of the old, narrower alloy standard. Now it’s come full circle with alloy bars built to the new carbon-inspired clamp standard—35 millimeters—but with that old flexy feeling that keeps your hands running like it’s the early aughts.

“Definitely, the pendulum swings too far,” Richards posits. “We went down that road with the 820-millimeter-wide bar trend, where it was just a number and bigger was better. And then people dialed it back and you’re like, ‘Oh, my handling is actually less responsive and it’s heavier and stiff er and then it doesn’t really fit me. So then I’m trimming the 800 bar and now it’s stiff er because I’m actually wanting it at 740.’”

In some strange cases you can only go back in time once technology catches up. For example, now that there’s a mechanical T-type option for SRAM drivetrains, people are swapping out their electronic derailleurs to get batteries back off their bikes. Does anyone really need another battery in their life?

Even frame design has become a loop. “I think Horst link is basically the prototypical suspension platform that everything else is evolved from,” says Sam Burkhardt, Transition Bicycle Company’s product director. “The more that you continue to refine the concept, if you have a good fundamental, it’s all physics—there’s nothing new.”

Horst link, it turns out, still has all the latitude in it to tune to today’s ride characteristics, and the most iconic four-bar bike of all time came out in 2004. The Kona Stinky Dee Lux only had a single pivot to the wheel axle, along with what are now ridiculous proportions, so it wasn’t technically Horst link, but ask a caricature artist to draw a mountain bike and that’s the one they’d draw. To a layperson it would look just like a modern bike.

“I think that part of what’s kind of cool with this setup is that what people have been looking for—all this stuff in their suspension curves, like progression, or what’s trending for those different things change over time—there’s enough fl exibility that you can still achieve a lot of different end results from the same concept,” Burkhardt adds.

What’s more, you can still fit a water bottleand full-length seat post, which became novel all over again a few years back. And high pivot? Well, Transition hasn’t gone there yet, but most of them are still just a Horst link, according to Burkhardt.

“If you look at a company like Norco, they basically take the same general concept and just move that main pivot way higher. And then they add that idler,” he says. “But at its core it’s still the exact same concept: a rocker link four-bar suspension platform. So that’s a great example of people doing something different with a concept that’s been around for a really long time.”

In other words, three decades deep, the original suspension design is still the most versatile, the most dependable, and the most gimmick-free. And some of the oldest design trends in mountain biking are still the most functional.

Should this be surprising, though? Afterall, we still fly in planes and helicopters from the Vietnam era because, technically speaking, what works at any given point in time will always work. It’s only our needs and wants that change, not the basic principles of mechanics. What we like tends to play out in historical loops. In some cases, like the mighty wheel or vinyl, that loop is literal.