So, what’s next for the team? Well, we’ve been saying that the Ohlins TTX is the best damper on the market all year and it looks like it may finally be getting its debut on a major World Cup team.

Loic Bruni has posted a picture of his first day back testing on the Specialized Demo and surprise, surprise, it’s fitted with some Swedish gold. He said: “Good first DH day of 2017 with the best bike and the locals.”

Good first DH day of 2017 with the best bike and the locals @ponsmelvin @kheyrault… #pace #nofilter #home #demo @iamspecialized_mtb

A photo posted by Loic Bruni (@loicbruni29) on Jan 4, 2017 at 1:03pm PST

He interestingly doesn’t tag Ohlins in the post but it’s more than likely they won’t actually be a sponsor. Even in Moto GP, where the brand is legendary, brands are forced to buy in their dampers.

While the shock is clearly Ohlins, we’re a bit more mystified as to what the fork would be. Last year the Specialized Gravity Republic ran Rockshox, but would SRAM be happy with the team running a Boxxer but not a Vivid? We doubt it.

It could be an Ohlins original fork but the last we saw of that was an inverted dual crown prototype. This looks to be a totally different beast. We’ll update on January tenth when the big team news drops but we reckon the Fox/RockShox domination of the circuit could finally be shaken up a little.