Product Review: Cannondale Lefty

Almost every day a new shop customer stops to gawk at one of the in-store Cannondale mountain bikes equipped with a Lefty HeadShok, and we can understand why; the Lefty is one of the most outrageous looking bike inventions in recent history.

Instead of describing it here we thought we'd post a Cannondale video, below. What we will say is that from our extensive personal experience the Left works really well, and no matter how odd it looks at first it causes virtually no discernible difference in bike handling. Oh, and it's really light, and very laterally stiff - more so than any other fork on the market.

One really interesting new feature for 2010 (mentioned near the end of the video): Cannondale now offers an adapter so that you can use a Lefty fork on any conventional 1 1/8 inch steerer tube frame, which means most mountain bikes on the trails today can now be equipped with an aftermarket Lefty. Cool.

The only real downside is that you need a specific hub type to use the fork which means you don't have as many hub choices available to you, but the trade off is well worth the excellent performance.