Daniel Manfredsson isn’t one to shy away from audacious bike designs, taking trends to extremes and coming up with some unashamedly bonkers creations.
Manfredsson started out by dreaming up digital versions of bikes, with his bikes of the future and Trek Daemon, which played around with Trek’s acronym naming system (an eNomad please, Daniel?).
He then moved his designs into the real world by creating his dream version of a Cannondale F29.
His latest creation sees him carry out the same treatment to a Cannondale Super V, which he says has resulted in either “timeless art, or just a cocktail giving you mental diarrhoea.”
The starting point for Manfredsson’s Super V was to ask two questions: What would the Super V look like if it was in production today? And, what would the bike look like if someone had kept it alive with retro upgrades?
The paintwork has details lifted from Rapha and Palace Skateboard’s recent collaboration and touches of EF-Education Nippo’s pink and blue colour scheme.
You can also check out Manfredsson’s ideas for adapting the Super V with modern mountain bike geometry on his Instagram.
Elsewhere, the bike has a Selle Italia Turbo saddle, Kenda K-829 tyres and smatterings of purple anodisation, which will hopefully quell some retro-purists’ discontent.
Manfredsson now works as a designer for Cannondale, confirming possibly that there is an appetite for wilder things in the bike industry.
You might see some of his bold ideas in the flesh soon enough, but in the meantime, here is the Super V in his own words.
As a Cannondale nerd, the Super V in its many different versions is something special to me. The Y frame design is super iconic and it really screams “full sus!” – kind of the opposite to today where we just hide and cover functions and features, and everything going outside the double diamond frame design gets punished and laughed at.
Are we maybe a bit more boring today, and also a lot less flamboyant?
This build has a double nature. The drivetrain side is retro, in its paint scheme, decals and stickers. It should look like a '90s version of the bike, where someone has upgraded it with cool retro parts and kept it alive.
The other side is much more influenced by modern Cannondales, adding a bit of the awesome Palace-Rapha paint as well as some EF racing fade going on, and asks, what if the Super V was still in production today?
From this side, we can really see the frame shape and what a strong design it is.
Okay, the Super V was not alone on the market with Y-frame design, but you immediately knew that it was something special.
The idea was also to heavily mix colours, graphics and finishes so in its full, the bike would look like a mess of parts put together, but when you zoom in, you can actually find interesting contrasts or total mindful harmony – or something like that.
The build list is kind of hard to compile, but it is a mix of parts from the late '80s to the late '90s, with some brand-new parts thrown in.
I would like to quickly get it in a more used condition with scratches, dents and sun-faded paint to make it really hard to tell if this is a new or old build. Timeless art, or just a cocktail of all things giving you mental diarrhoea.
I couldn’t really remove the idea of how the Super V would be if it was still alive or introduced today. So I roughly just sketched a Super V, but with modern Scalpel geometry.
I also added some minor updates to the suspension, like better linkage, adding more rear travel and adding a 100mm version of the Headshock.
The bike is still rough, and not really a progressive take on the design, but there is something there, and I need to explore this more.
