SPECIALIZED BEGAN as a company that made absolutely nothing—at first, it consisted of one guy, a bearded college graduate named Mike Sinyard, importing components from Europe. After selling his VW microbus in 1974 to finance his business, Sinyard delivered parts by bike to Bay Area shops and emerging mountain-bike-frame builders. By the early eighties, Specialized was making and selling the hugely popular Stumpjumper, the first mass-market mountain bike. These days, Sinyard, 59, runs a corporate behemoth that designs and sells a large range of bikes—road, hybrid, cross-country, downhill, enduro, freeride, touring, and cyclocross.

The 2009 Epic project launched in April 2007 at Specialized's Morgan Hill, California, headquarters, about an hour south of San Francisco. There, under a strip of fluorescent lights, a group of guys—Specialized's "High-Performance Mountain-Bike Pod"—assembled to lay out project goals on a whiteboard.

From the start, the new Epic was seen as a top-of-the-line racing steed that would showcase the prowess of Specialized's creative team. The time-tested idea was that racing victories would cast a halo over the company's other product lines, serving as a vital marketing tool. Before it was all over, Specialized would pour around $2 million into the effort.

By starting early, the team hoped Specialized-sponsored athletes could show off the bike in major 2008 races. The main challenge would fall to Christoph Sauser, a pro from Switzerland, whose goal was to win the cross-country world championships on the bike in June, at Val di Sole, Italy. "The Epic is all about absolute speed, about making the ultimate tool for Christoph," Sinyard later explained.

The High-Performance Mountain-Bike Pod, an A-Team of veteran bike builders, would join forces to chase this goal. German engineer Jan Talavasek is a master of the tricky art of carbon-fiber fabrication; product manager Brandon Sloan races downhill competitively; suspension leader Mike "Mick" McAndrews helped create the first batch of RockShox suspension forks, in 1992; and 21-year Specialized veteran Robert Egger has created iconic designs that have found their way into places like the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Sloan's notes from the meeting were both mundane and cryptic. At least one water bottle cage in main triangle. Minimize weight, meet stiffness goals, keep standover low. One bolder point was marked "USP" (for "unique selling proposition"): Fastest XC competition bike ever with real susp.

Speed on a racing bike comes from a combination of lighter weight, improved power transfer, pedaling efficiency, bump control, and steering precision. The crew had 18 months to get the bike into production, and the mission required them to upgrade the bike's overall efficiency while shaving grams wherever possible.

One way to cut weight and improve ride quality was through what the company had labeled "total suspension integration"—meaning they would build the front and rear suspensions and cranks in-house instead of being locked into using standardized parts sold by others. A major move here was the rehiring of Mick McAndrews. The 49-year-old Californian had worked in motorcycle R&D at Kawasaki for a decade before pioneering bicycle suspension at RockShox, Fox Racing, Specialized, and then Maverick American.

The wheels on a modern cross-country mountain bike attach to the frame dynamically, with front and rear suspension that moves up and down over rocks and bumps. A racer's ideal suspension helps him descend more quickly but doesn't slow him down on flats and climbs.

Any bike-suspension mechanism has two components—a spring and a damper—and on a typical fork, each fits into one leg. On the Epic's front shock, a chamber of compressed air acts as the spring. The damper, which controls the spring's up-and-down movement, relies on oil forced through small openings, which impedes spring bounce by adding a tiny amount of resistance. The 2009 Epic's front fork, code-named E100, came from a new idea McAndrews had for a concentric design, which shaved off a sixth of a pound by putting both the damper and spring mechanisms in one fork leg instead of separate legs. That fork alone required 18 months of design and testing.

With its first Epic model, in 2001, Specialized pioneered rear suspension that vastly reduced pedal bob, the bane of such systems. Bobbing, or rider-induced bouncing, impedes the direct transfer of a pedal stroke to forward motion. For the '09 model McAndrews and his team decided not to radically rethink the rear shock; instead, they would lighten it with a slimmer shock body and incorporate two existing Specialized patents into its design. One was a linkage system that allowed the rear wheel to move only up and down, not fore and aft, thus eliminating the chain-length fluctuations that hinder many systems.

Another device was a so-called inertia- valve system, invented by McAndrews at Specialized in 1998. This valve, known as Brain Technology inside the company, consists of a small cylinder containing a metal weight that's attached to a seatstay and connected by a hose to the shock. Upward forces from rough terrain displace the weight, opening the valve to let oil flow in and engage the suspension. On smooth surfaces, the weight closes the valving and deactivates the shock. The idea is to provide a rider with suspension only when it's needed. Improvements were made to address delays in shock activation and deactivation on the 2008 model.

The payoff of the endless fine-tuning was incremental but crucial. "If there's six grams to be had in a new design, we'll chase it," McAndrews says. With this and other innovations, half a pound was trimmed from the suspension.