Just when you thought that everything in bicycle suspension had possibly already been invented, along comes another one. This is the all-new full-suspension bike from Felt, a relatively new brand that until now has concentrated on hardtails.

It was just biding its time, though. As Felt’s Director of Product Development Brian Wilson explained, “We didn’t want to just do something that someone else had done – it had to be our design”. That’s not just a matter of corporate ego – these days you’ve pretty much got to have your own suspension design to acheive any sort of brand credibility. Specialized has FSR, Marin has Quad-Link, Giant has Maestro and now Felt has Equilink.

Coming up with a unique design is easier said than done, though. For a start, whatever you come up with has to work, otherwise there’s not much point. But it has to work in a readily-explainable different way while simultaneously navigating a clear path through the patent-infested waters of suspension design.

At first glance, the Felt Virtue doesn’t look terribly unique. In profile it appears to be something of a Turner clone. Look more closely, though, and there’s a lot more going on here. For a start, the lower swingarm pivot is actually a linkage, while there are no pivots anywhere near the dropouts. The rear triangle is carbon fibre, which is designed to flex slightly to accommodate the slightly different arcs of the upper and lower links.

If that was all there was to it, the back end would rapidly get bewildered and not know which bits of itself to allow to hinge in which directions. But the key to the Equilink is the eponymous link itself, a slim, red anodised strut that joins the upper and lower pivots. This is the clever bit. It’s claimed to do a couple of useful things. First, it means that the whole thing is effectively an approximate parallelogram, so the rear axle path is something close to straight up and down and hence generally perpendicular to drivetrain and thrust forces. And second, any drivetrain forces that do sneak through tend to try to rotate the bottom link downwards, which causes the Equilink to try to pull the upper link downwards too, thus holding the back end up and stopping it from wallowing.

As you’d expect, Felt lists all sorts of benefits for its design. Most of them will be fairly familiar to anyone who’s read any bicycle marketing blurb recently – no bob, light weight, efficient, no pedal kickback etc. There are a couple of more interesting claims, though. Felt says that its bike doesn’t rely on a platform shock but that riders are welcome to use one if they like – the design isn’t geared around any particular type or brand of shock. And it’s said to be very setup-tolerant too. Some bikes out there ride fantastically when they’re set up right but feel really quite nasty if you’re 10psi out either way. The Equilink is supposed to not mind all that much – a bit too much or too little air in the rear shock and it’ll just be firmer or softer, it won’t do anything odd. That should mean plenty of scope for setting the bike up as you like it.

We’ll have to wait and see how the reality stacks up – we haven’t had a chance to ride a Virtue yet. It’s certainly a clean-looking bike, though. There’ll be four spec levels, all sharing a 130mm travel, aluminium front, carbon fibre rear frame (althought the cheaper bikes have a slightly heavier front end). The bike’s designed as an endurance race bike – if you’re looking for something a little more “all-mountain” then Felt’s next bike may be more your bag. Virtues will be available soon – full test as soon as we can.