WHILE McANDREWS and his team worked on the Epic's shocks, Jan Talavasek designed its frame and managed the eventual production of 21 different men's and women's carbon-fiber and aluminum models.

At Specialized for just two years, Tala­va­sek, 31, was a relative newcomer. His engineering career had started at Audi, where he found the pace of automobile innovation too slow. Work at a small German bike company took him to Taiwan. There he met Specialized's engineering director, Mark Schroeder, who eventually hired him and moved him to the U.S. (Specialized works with a subsidiary in Taiwan and China to conduct the bulk of its manufacturing.)

Talavasek started designing the Epic by making simple two-dimensional sketches, playing around with the frame geometry and the way the suspension systems would connect to it. Armed with a few new ideas, he met with Egger, Specialized's creative director, who was responsible for the bike's ultimate look.

Egger, 47, is a tall man with a buzz cut and a wide smile, and he's the lead designer behind most of Specialized's products. Having raced bikes in his native Wisconsin, Egger got a degree in industrial design and worked for companies like Trek and Blackburn. He was wrenching at a bike store called Ve­lomeister, near Specialized, when Sinyard found him in 1986.

One day at the Specialized offices, Egger gives me a tour of the gallery that houses many of his creations. We check out his low-riding Dragstripper concept bike, along with the S-Works E5 road bike that Mario Cipollini rode to win the 2002 Milan–San Remo. Egger shows me how he tries to mimic the curvature of the earth in each frame's central arc and points to midcentury-modern designer Le Corbusier as a master of form and function.

The tour leads into a slide show, on his silver iPhone, of the Tuscan-style house he and his wife have built over the past six years. They lived in a small trailer for two years and spent nights hammering. "There's my garage, and that's a model of a 1965 race car I'm building," he says, pointing as he clicks to other images. "See that garage door? I designed it. See those metal hinges? I forged them."

Egger is the quintessential Specialized employee, a do-it-all-yourselfer who, unlike other designers and engineers, usually eschews the computer for the workshop and sometimes likes to flesh out preliminary designs in wood. He runs his department of 15 staffers with a tight fist, requiring that all workers show up at 8 A.M. and leave by 5:30.

Egger and Talavasek have a solid professional relationship, but it isn't free of disagreements. A bike engineer often leans toward straight, round tubes, while a designer is drawn to more creative, sculptural shapes.

"We have the luxury of advanced materials that allow us to really open our minds as far as how we are shaping tubes," says Egger, who tries to design bikes that communicate their purpose visually. "I look at Christoph Sauser and I think, He's a race engine, and he needs the machine under him to accentuate his ability."

Egger wanted the Epic to have a small, elegant top tube. But Talavasek wanted to create a light tube that had thin walls and a large diameter. Their solution was an ovalized tube that performed the duty of a top tube—reducing side bending—while looking thinner from the side.

The 2008 Epic had a pretty, asymmetrical rear suspension that put the shock body in the rear triangle. That design demanded stronger, heavier front-triangle tubes to compensate for its side load. Egger and Talavasek agreed to ditch the prior setup, center the shock, and move it into the front triangle. Talavasek designed a two-piece swing link to attach the rear triangle to the front.

Whatever their differences of opinion, the partnership works because, in the end, Egger and Talavasek have the same thing in mind. "Our goal," Egger says, "is always to make a bike that you are just salivating wanting to ride it."