Cannondale has reacted to consumer demand and revealed a new addition to its Ocho range.

The American frame and fork brand is best known for its single-sided Lefty fork, which debuted back in the very late 1990s and has since been the choice for those who desire stiffness and low mass, for an XC or XCO mountain bike.

Engineers and industrial designers have now produced the Ocho Righty. It uses the same structure and single CSU as a Cannondale Lefty, but attaches a front wheel the opposite way.

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The internals swap bushings for needle bearings, like all Lefty forks, delivering 100mm of very active and small-bump sensitive suspension travel.

Experienced mountain bikers and followers of the Cannondale brand will be questioning why resources have been deployed on a project to create this Lefty ‘twin’. For Cannondale, it was a combination of internal engineering discoveries and external consumer pressure.

Real benefits trigger the change

The suggestion for this new Righty Ocho sourced from a group of junior engineers at Cannondale, who discover something noteworthy after running various CFD models on the brand’s Scalpel range. What they found, was that an Ocho Righty would be theoretically more aerodynamic, when considering the Scalpel as an entire drag-coefficient entity.

Although aero is less of an issue in the mountain bike world, it still matters. Evidence of this is the UCI’s continued banning of skin-tight riding gear for downhill racers. With the Cannondale Scalpel, engineers and aerodynamicists saw a dramatic improvement in computer modelling outcomes, when they changed the Ocho’s single fork leg from left to right.

With this new Righty Ocho, the fork’s lower structure acts as a first point of aerodynamic contact for all the rotational components on the bike’s drive side, such as its chainring and cassette. Mountain bikers often underappreciate how much wake turbulence is caused by a chainring and cassette, spinning under power.

With the Righty Ocho, airflow is dispersed to create less potential for aerodynamic drag onto and within the drivetrain.

Cannondale’s Righty Ocho uses the same single-sided hub as the Lefty, which should please Scalpel owners keen on switching over.