DEEP INSIDE THE HUGE Northern California warehouse that's home to Specialized Bicycle Components, there's a walled-in testing room with a single window and a locked door. Piled nearby are heaps of coal-black carbon-fiber bicycle frames that have been cracked, bent, twisted, and snapped—all in the name of building better and faster machines.

Here, lab manager Sam Pickman oversees a process that might be too painful for bike lovers to watch: ultimate-strength testing, in which frames are stressed to the point of catastrophic failure. Right now, four are mounted on steel contraptions that push, pull, and flex their tubes in various directions. Carbon fiber, a weave of extremely thin carbon strands bonded with microscopic crystals, is a strong material with little give. When a carbon-fiber tube finally breaks, it doesn't just bend and pop like metal. It detonates, with a sound like an M-80.

"Catastrophic is the ultimate, the best, because it's got everything," says Pickman, a lanky, 27-year-old mechanical engineer who's also a Category 2 road-bike racer. "There's anticipation, and then you're actually scared. Then it explodes."

This torture test is just one step in the complicated process of creating a modern high-end bike. Most frames sent to the lab have been designed on computers by Specialized's engineers and then cast inside molds at an Asian factory, after which they're sent back to California. The menu of abuse includes strength tests that push the head tube until the frame cracks, bottom-out-fatigue tests that simulate a rider going off a large drop, and 24-hour stress tests that mimic 15 years of use and expose microscopic design flaws.

In January 2008, when I stop by the lab, Pickman is knee-deep in broken frames that were designed for a 2009 cross-country mountain bike called the S-Works Epic, the company's upgrade of its popular 2008 Epic. (The S-Works designation is used for high-end bikes.) Before it's all over, more than 100 test frames will be destroyed—the backbones of bikes that will eventually sell for around $8,500 apiece.

In some ways, upgrades are routine—at Specialized, they happen every few years with most major models—but the designers have decided to use the 2009 project as an occasion to fundamentally rethink the bike. When Specialized released the first Epic, in 2001, its full-suspension system was revolutionary, but other companies have since caught up. For the Epic's second major redesign, Specialized is seeking to raise the level of performance even higher by making the whole bike lighter and more responsive.

The amount of planning, manpower, and expense that go into the changes provide a great case study in what happens when a cutting-edge bike company raises the bar for itself. This is especially true with the 2009 Epic, because the goal is nothing less than to create the lightest, strongest, and most responsive mountain bike for racing that anyone has ever built.