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Cannondale Headquarters Tour, Part 2 – Wild prototypes & team bikes!

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When we visited Cannondale’s HQ just before CX Nats, we took a lot of photos of bikes. Prototypes, concepts, team bikes and one-off race rigs. Being a shared office with GT, there were plenty to see from both brands, so we’re splitting them up. Here’s the Cannondales, starting with this insane aero concept with inline skate wheels up front. Naturally, we had to ask, how does it steer?

“In a word – terribly,” according to Cannondale’s living historian (and Director of Product Marketing). “There is a whole series of mechanical cables that run from the articulating armrests to the rollerblade wheels. When you move the armrest, the wheels turn in series to initiate the turn. This was a prototype that sought to increase aerodynamic efficiency by eliminating the big rotating front wheel, but in doing so, it also eliminated a major source of bicycle stability. The only person I ever saw successfully ride this for more than a few meters was champion trials stud, Libor Karas.”

The cables pulling the wheels into a turn pulled each a slightly different amount. Those little hoses going into the axle? One person thought they might have been coolant for the bearings, but the reality is no one really ever rode this long enough or fast enough to need that. They are, as best as anyone can remember, feeding small drum brakes.

This was a limited edition commuter bike with a left-armed Headshok and right-armed drivetrain.

Lefty-style forks make a lot of appearances, and not always with suspension. This was an aero flat bar road bike concept with integrated stem design. Note the wheel cutouts and everything!

Most of the good stuff was made for trails, though. This was one of (if not the) first production full rear suspension mountain bike on the market. The Cannondale EST used a simple single-pivot unified rear triangle. (UPDATE: Per the comments, yes, this is simply a single pivot bike, a URT would have the BB on the rear triangle, too)

Much more modern, this FSi hardtail got a chromed paint that they said was way to expensive to put into production.

OK, OK, so Schwinn isn’t a Cannondale, but these were the only examples laying around. Back in the day, the Straight 8 was a popular DH option. In the background is an air-sprung Super V for Myles Rockwell.

Remember when XC race bikes used to have triple chainrings? This one belonged to Tinker Juarez…

…and this Canadian themed one was Alison Sydor’s race bike.

Remember Simon? This came out shortly after we started Bikerumor and definitely blew some peoples’ minds. We had to ask: Anything new on this “smart suspension” front that Cannondale is working on?

“Sadly, no. Simon, as it was called, was WAAAY ahead of its time and was unbelievably sophisticated, allowing riders to change virtually everything about the shocks performance. You could toggle between different ride modes and travels, so you could go from wide open, “long” travel trail fork feel, to short travel, XC feeling suspension on the fly. And it had a truly dynamic, active platform, meaning the fork’s valving could go from hard lockout, to wide open before the tire even fully deformed around an obstacle. But we found that from a cost and complexity standpoint, it just wasn’t viable, so the program was dropped.”

Settings were controlled with a thumb joystick (above), and accelerometers and sensors at the top and bottom of the fork told the system what you and the ground were doing and adjusted the suspension accordingly.

Check out our coverage from Interbike 2009 to see a video run down and all the tech put into this system…it’s really quite amazing!

Fearless as she might be, Missy “The Missile” Giove had some insane tech helping her pilot the high speed runs she became so famous for. Above, one of the prototype rigs, with this explanation:

“The Fulcrum DH bike was a team-only race prototype that never was intended for production. It was one of the first, possibly the first “virtual pivot” bike out there, and setting the suspension up properly required a consistent chainring size. To solve the issue of how to get different effective chainring sizes while keeping the drive chain engagement point constant, we engineered a ‘jackshaft’ style arrangement. By changing the ratios of the various drive rings, we could get a huge range of effective “chainring” sizes.

“Way too complex for anything other than a full factory team to deal with, it never was meant for production. However, we did use the oversize, HeadShok dimension headtube to create a variable angle headset about 10 years before anyone sold them commercially. And the fork provided a lot of engineering solutions that were used to create the Lefty forks.”

Confused yet?

Here’s how it works: Pedaling forces are driving the left-side chainring, which via the chain drives the ring in front of it. That’s connected to the right side front ring via an axle, which is connected via chain to a smaller chainring rotating around (but not driven by) the crank’s spindle. That smaller right side rear ring is attached to the spider of the bigger chainring you see on the outside (where a normal chainring would be), which drives the chain leading backward to the cassette. If you saw the bike pedaling, the large outer chainring would be rotating faster than the crank arms. Despite this, it would feel normal while pedaling…if you set it all up to replicate a 50-tooth chainring, it would feel like you were pedaling a 50-tooth chainring despite the different rotating speeds.

The point of all this was to allow the rider to change the effective chainring size by varying any of the four smaller rings, but not change the outside diameter of the chainring driving the cassette. Back in these days, downhillers would sometimes run massive chainrings, but this particular suspension design required a fixed tooth count to work properly. It took a team of people intimately familiar with it about an hour to change the effective gear size because a) they had to know what the math was, and b) the chains would have to be retensioned after each adjustment.

For a historical reference point, this bike serves as a fine example of just how much things have changed. Rotors are bigger, brakes now have four pistons, and head angles are way slacker and forks travel further. Tires are a helluva lot bigger, too.

Check out the customized shift paddles!

Missy’s bike paved the way for Anne-Caroline Chausson’s:

From Cannondale: “This is Anne-Caroline Chausson’s Team-only Fulcrum DH bike. It’s the third evolution of the Fulcrum concept that first debuted in ’97. This version eliminated the complex and heavy jackshaft crank system of the earlier versions and featured an evolution of the Moto SuperDownhill HeadShok fork (150mm travel – basically a long HeadShok needle bearing system in each leg).”

The fork legs look a little bigger, but they’re still running a regular stem:

If lock-on grips aren’t available…

Brakes were upgraded to four-piston Coda calipers, but you can still see how things have evolved. These use a closed body; modern calipers have massive openings at the top to vent heat. And those giant holes on the rotor’s braking surface probably didn’t provide anywhere near the friction and stopping power modern riders would expect. Seeing all of this just makes the pros’ performances of yesteryear all the more impressive.

By this point in the bike’s evolution, riders had settled on a fairly small range of chainring sizes, usually within 2-4 teeth of each other for any given course. And cassette range had grown some, too. So, Cannondale was now able to fine tune the linkage lengths to work well enough within the most commonly used chainring sizes and drop about six pounds off the frame by losing the jackshaft system.

Revised tube shaping and a lower gusset removed the need for the support struts of Missy’s bike.

Want more? Stay tuned for the GT bikes in Part 3, going live on Friday!

Cannondale.com

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brettrobinson
7 years ago

Love these headquarters walkthroughs.

JBikes
JBikes
7 years ago

Sometimes its hard to imagine that today’s latest will probably look just as dated in 20 years later. Cool tour.

ELEVEN_g
7 years ago
Reply to  JBikes

That, errr ‘bike’ looks as odd now as the time it hit the magazines back whenever. it’s never dates, it’s just remained… odd and strangely cool.

Beat_the_trail
Beat_the_trail
7 years ago

The number or size of holes in a rotor doesn’t affect the swept area. Typically, you limit the size of the holes to cut down on vibration and noise.

Ripnshread
Ripnshread
7 years ago

The Schwinn was made by Yeti only with Schwinn paint. Homegrown.

Greg
Greg
7 years ago
Reply to  Ripnshread

I had one of those, bassboat green, like a dumbass I sold it.

Brian Robinson
Brian Robinson
7 years ago

Sorry Tyler, that is not a URT (the BB must be part of the rear triangle), it’s just a single pivot.

Mike
Mike
7 years ago

I remember when that rollerblade aero bike came out (height of the rollerblade fad as I recall). It looked cuckoo for cocoa puffs back then. Still looks cuckoo for cocoa puffs now. At least some things stay the same.

packfill
packfill
7 years ago

That’s not a URT bike.

JC
JC
7 years ago
Reply to  packfill

True story, Packfill. Also, the Outland VPP predates the Fulcrum by 3 years and was acutally a production model.

ginsu
ginsu
7 years ago

That roller blade bike just proves that some engineers have more money than sense.

Daniel M
Daniel M
7 years ago

My bike has no front wheel.

-So how does it steer?

AWFUL!

satisFACTORYrider
satisFACTORYrider
7 years ago

no find there 4stroke mxer in that building?!

satisFACTORYrider
satisFACTORYrider
7 years ago
Reply to  Tyler Benedict

indeed. there’s a local who has his posted on craigslist here. if i had spare change i’d get it.

mrazekan
mrazekan
7 years ago

I have one and I love it. Though it was reworked by ATK before it ended up in my hands. Some people knocked the motor. There are amateurs still racing them to this day. It was a race motor. So unless you were on top of the maintenance and repairs, it would not last in street/track/trail use. ATK made some changes to make it more reliable.

Casey F. Ryback
Casey F. Ryback
7 years ago

What a cool tour of the headquarters. When a major player in the industry takes chances, it is cool to see what happens.

Lucas
Lucas
7 years ago

…..take too many chances and go bankrupt.

Pete
Pete
7 years ago

Too bad that concept bike didn’t have a front wheel, even a 24″ would have transformed it.

Inline skates abandoned that size wheel (<80mm) for good reason.

Chris
Chris
7 years ago
Reply to  Pete

24″ front wheel would pretty much make it an 80’s era time trial bike.

patrick
patrick
7 years ago

Great tour!

We found that exact pair of Azonic handlebars in my parents’ basement a couple weeks ago! Combined with a small ‘long’ 2 bolt stem, they are absolute junk compared to mid level XC stuff. Missy and Anne-Caroline were/are brave girls!

timbo
timbo
7 years ago

Where’s the Alex Pong bike?

Tim
Tim
7 years ago

And the Dh fork became Lefty when one of the engineers figured cutting one in half would give a 100mm travel xc fork that was lighter than any 63mm travel fork

Nico
Nico
7 years ago

No Alex Pong Magic bike? Where did it go?
I guess somewhere there must also be tons of drawings, photographs etc from ideas.
Would be great to walk through as well

Steve
Steve
7 years ago

da Vinci Designs does something similar to the Missy’s drive train on there tandem bikes with the da Vinci Designs’ Independent Coasting System (ICS)!

http://www.davincitandems.com/drivetrain-info/

Sark
Sark
7 years ago

First vpp by cannondale? Don’t think so. Check Outland vpp..pioneers

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