We’ve blatantly filched this leak from the pit snoopers at mountain bike daily but here’s the latest information on Cannondale’s new EPO XC bike.

The EPO abbreviation stands for “Engineered Pivot Orientation” a system which would seem to use a tuned amount of vertical flex along the length of the chainstay to avoid the use of pivots. The composite chainstay will be made of carbon fiber, fiberglass, and nylon and be bonded into the dropouts and bottom bracket shell at either end. They’ll have to use some damn clever weaving to keep the lateral stiffness Dale’s are legendary for though.

Judging by the shock position (vertical just behind the seat tube) seen in the drawings so far the system will still need to use some kind of linkage to control the planned 2.5″ of travel. Presumably something along the lines of the ultra narrow ‘seatstay’ struts of the Raven back end will help keep whole bike weight to the 23lb target complete with discs.

Anyway we’ll keep joining the dots until they reveal the whole picture at the pre season team camp in March.