Will Pole will be trialling a prototype Pole Machine 200 bike with a radical cockpit setup at this weekend’s Fort William World Cup?

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Check out this Instagram post from Pole that shows a Pole rider standing besides a new Pole Machine 200 downhill bike with a stem that appears to set behind the headset…

Caption: polebicycles “Look what we have here ? @isakleivsson will be racing this prototype #Machine200 at Fort William @ucidownhillworld”

Hang on a mo though, there are also some posts from Pole’s DH racer Isak Leivsson that don’t appear to show this radical stem setup. So will he be racing this at Fort Bill or not? Only time will tell.

Anyway… back to the gossip.

This cockpit setup is by far the most progressive we’ve seen yet in the whole push towards reworking mountain bike geometry into the brave new world of long-is-good thinking, that pairs super lengthy frames with as short as possible stem lengths.

Pole have seemingly now gone the whole hog and dived behind the headtube for their handlebar positioning. It’s certainly an intriguing new combination of steering axis, head tube angle and fork offset.

The closest we’ve got to this point before is the first version of Mondraker Forward Geometry that had a 20mm-long stem that mounted on top of the fork steerer. Before that there have also been obscure 0mm stem setups from smaller dirtjump bike-focussed brands.

This is the first time we’ve seen a stem clamp that is slightly set behind the headset. It’s hard to see exactly what the setup is via this low-res Instagram piccie. We’ve tried zooming in and it looks to be something similar to the old Mondraker Forward Geometry stems except mounted ‘backwards’.