With a Rider-First Engineered design, refined and improved Brain suspension and a redesigned frame, the Women's S-Works Epic is the fastest most capable and best fitting women's XC bike Specialized have ever created.
Race courses have evolved over the past few years becoming more technical, steeper and simply more challenging to ride. Specialized saw this as an opportunity to make something special something that both World Cup athletes and XC riders alike can instantly feel the benefit from. Looking at the sum of parts that make a bike handle well, like the head angle, reach stack, chainstay length, fork offset etc. Specialized re-evaluated all of it. Increasing the reach made a bike that was more stable at speed and generally more comfortable to ride. Dropper posts fit and not just a short-travel XC option but full-length droppers that fit in the 30.9mm seat tube. The head angle has been slacked that out but not without evaluating the overall handling package. It now lands on a custom offset 42mm fork that works with the slacker head angle in order to behave itself in tight corners and through switchbacks.
Next comes the redesigned Brain technology Brain 2.0. The Brain changed the way the bike world looked at suspension both its inefficiencies and benefits alike. It won races and put a flag in the ground for Specialized as a true leader in innovation and suspension development but they knew that they could make it better. By moving the Brain closer to the rear axle it would be in the most sensitive spot. After countless hours with the RockShox team the new Brain became more than just a slight upgrade. It's totally new. Now it reacts seamlessly to bump forces it has much more consistent damping performance and finally it integrates the hoses into the suspension links. This in turn improves oil paths and it creates an incredibly sleek package that outperforms anything on the market.
The new Women's Epic also gets a serious upgrade in the stiffness department. The Rider-First Engineered tubes place complex carbon pieces in all the right places which greatly increases stiffness in the front end for a vast improvement in ride quality and control. To go along with this each frame size has size-specific tubes that result in the stiffest best riding XC bike they've ever developed no matter the frame size.
With the goal of the new Epic to be the fastest XC mountain bike, weight was at the top of the priorities list. Specialized started with an efficient frame layout and tube shapes that feature clean cable routing, integrated channels through the shock extension, straight tubes with less curves and optimised torsion profiles in every section. This weight savings is equivalent to shedding a chainstay and shock extension from the previous Epic, nearly 350 grams.
For the S-Works model, the build spares no expense with a custom RockShox SID World Cup fork with the exclusive Brain technology, a rear RockShox Brain shock at the rear that's custom-tuned for women, a 12-speed SRAM XX1 Eagle groupset, powerful SRAM Level Ultimate brakes and hand-built featherweight Roval Control SL carbon fibre wheels.