Abstract The twisted suspension of a manifold is obtained by surgery along the fibre of a principal circle bundle over the manifold. It generalizes the spinning operation for knots and preserves various topological properties. In this article, we show that Riemannian metrics of positive Ricci curvature can be lifted along twisted suspensions. As an application we show that the maximal symmetry rank of a closed, simply connected Riemannian manifold of positive Ricci curvature is $(n-2)$ in all dimensions $n\geq 4$. Further applications include simply connected 6-manifolds whose homology has torsion, (rational) homology spheres in all dimensions at least 4, and manifolds with prescribed third homology.