Laurie Greenland showed up at Whistler’s first-ever UCI Downhill World Cup this weekend on a bike that isn’t really a downhill bike. Not yet, anyway. According to Pinkbike’s report from Creekside, the prototype Forbidden under him runs a front end lifted straight from the brand’s Dreadnought E eMTB — front triangle, battery mounting bosses and all, just with no motor or battery actually installed. It’s a DH race bike built out of an e-bike’s skeleton, and it’s real enough that Greenland pointed it down the 1199 course in front of a World Cup crowd.

That’s not a knock on Forbidden. It’s a genuinely clever shortcut, and it’s the kind of engineering story this site hasn’t touched yet this season — different from the eMTB motor fight we’ve been tracking all year and unrelated to the 32-inch wheel bets Trek and Scott made a week earlier. This is a small gravity brand figuring out how to move a race bike program forward without waiting eighteen months for a from-scratch frame.

Quick Take

What it is	Acoustic (non-motorized) DH prototype built on the Dreadnought E’s eMTB front triangle
Rider	Laurie Greenland, testing/development role at Forbidden
Where spotted	Whistler DH World Cup, Sept 25-28, 2026
Purpose	Fast, cheap proof-of-concept to move Forbidden’s gravity project forward
Known compromise	Limited steering lock — frame still carries space designed for the eMTB battery, fork bumpers rotated to compensate
Production bike?	No. This sits alongside, not instead of, Forbidden’s existing Supernought DH bike
Best for	Anyone who follows how small brands actually fund and build race prototypes
Skip if	You’re after a bike you can order — nothing here is for sale

Forbidden Building DH Bikes Isn’t the News. This Shortcut Is.

Forbidden isn’t new to World Cup downhill. The Kelowna-based brand launched a dedicated World Cup DH team back in January 2022, signing Connor Fearon and Canadian rider Magnus Manson, with founder Owen Pemberton pointing out that the company itself was only three years old at the time. Fearon spent that season racing a high-pivot prototype that eventually became a production bike: the Forbidden Supernought, a full-carbon DH frame running the brand’s V2 Trifecta high-pivot linkage and 205mm of rear travel. That bike exists. You can buy a frameset today.

So Forbidden already has a proper race bike. What it apparently doesn’t have — or didn’t want to spend the time and money building from a blank sheet — is a second platform to test new ideas on before committing to another full frame program. The Whistler prototype is the answer to that problem, and it’s a scrappier answer than most brands would show in public.

What’s Actually Bolted Together Here

Per Pinkbike’s on-site reporting, the bike Greenland raced at Whistler is described as an early acoustic proof-of-concept — “acoustic” being the industry’s slightly awkward shorthand for a bike with no motor, borrowed from the audio world’s term for “not electric.” The front triangle comes straight off the Dreadnought E, Forbidden’s Avinox-powered enduro eMTB that runs 170mm of rear travel through a high-pivot Horst-link layout and a 180mm fork up front. Strip the motor and battery out of that front triangle, weld or bolt on whatever rear end and linkage Forbidden actually wants to test, and you’ve got a rolling test mule that didn’t require tooling a new frame from nothing.

The catch is the part that makes this a genuinely interesting engineering story instead of just a cute cost-saving hack: the frame still physically carries the space designed to hold the eMTB’s battery. That space doesn’t disappear just because the motor’s gone, and according to Pinkbike’s reporting, it limits how far the fork can turn before something hits the frame. Forbidden’s fix was mechanical, not structural — rotating the fork’s steering bumpers to compensate for the reduced lock rather than cutting new clearance into the front triangle.

Why Reuse an eMTB Frame for a DH Race Prototype?

1. Speed. A front triangle that already exists and is already validated skips months of the development calendar that a ground-up DH frame would eat.
2. Cost. Tooling, molds, and structural validation for a new carbon front end are expensive. Borrowing a proven one defers that spend until the concept is worth committing to.
3. Risk reduction. Testing a new rear-end linkage or geometry idea doesn’t require betting on an unproven front end at the same time — one variable changes, not two.
4. A real proof-of-concept, not a rendering. Greenland racing it at an actual World Cup, in front of the sport’s biggest crowd of the year, gives Forbidden race-pace feedback a static mockup or a local trail lap never would.

None of that is exotic thinking. It’s the same logic we like when we’re telling readers which first upgrades are actually worth the money instead of chasing a flashy full rebuild — a smaller brand being honest about what it can and can’t afford to build twice.

Steering Lock: The Compromise That Actually Matters

Limited steering lock sounds like a footnote until you think about what a DH World Cup track actually demands. Tight switchbacks, off-camber recoveries, last-second line corrections at speed — all of that eats into the fork’s available turning range. A production DH bike doesn’t have to think about battery clearance because there’s no battery to clear. This prototype does, and Forbidden’s workaround — rotating the bumpers rather than redesigning the front triangle — is a patch, not a fix. It’s the kind of trade-off you accept on a test mule you’re not planning to sell, and not one you’d want to see show up on a production Forbidden DH bike down the line.

That’s the honest read here: this bike proves a concept works well enough to race, not that the concept is finished. Big difference, and it’s worth remembering every time a “World Cup prototype” headline shows up without a production date attached — see also every 32-inch wheel bike Trek and Scott have raced this season without confirming either one ships.

The Dreadnought E, Explained

For anyone who hasn’t followed Forbidden’s eMTB side of the business, the Dreadnought E is the brand’s full-power enduro eMTB, built around Avinox’s M2S and M2 drive units — up to 130Nm of torque (150Nm in boost mode) and 1,300 watts of peak power on the M2S, slightly less on the M2 — paired with either a 600Wh or 800Wh battery depending on build. Pinkbike’s first-ride coverage summed up the riding character bluntly: it feels like a DH bike with a motor bolted in, which tracks with the geometry — mixed wheels only, a tall front end, slack angles, and a chassis built around short cranks for pedal clearance on steep terrain. That aggressive, gravity-leaning DNA is exactly why the front triangle translated to a DH test mule without looking absurd bolted to a race-focused rear end.

Laurie Greenland’s Own Detour Back to Racing

The rider matters as much as the bike here. Greenland spent years as a factory racer for Santa Cruz’s Syndicate team before parting ways at the end of last season. Rather than signing with another full-time World Cup team for 2026, he confirmed to Pinkbike that he’d be racing a reduced schedule, citing burnout and a need to step back from the pressure of chasing results every weekend. He later put that decision on camera in a self-funded project about rediscovering why he rides in the first place, describing the toll of racing in terms of an “invisible injury” — the kind that doesn’t show up on a scan but still ends a season.

Forbidden picked him up in a different capacity: development and testing rather than a full factory race seat. Pinkbike’s video from a Vancouver Island testing block earlier this year shows exactly what that looks like in practice — Greenland riding early proof-of-concept builds, giving the engineering team feedback at speed, on terrain the brand itself uses to shape its bikes. He’s on record saying he liked the idea of exploring a genuinely new platform after years on one bike — “new beginnings, new platform, new vision,” in his own words. Whistler is that testing relationship showing up at an actual race, not just a trail day.

It’s a sensible pairing. A rider who’s stepped back from full-time race pressure is exactly who you want putting early, unfinished ideas through their paces — someone with the credibility to give accurate feedback and, per his own account, less on the line if a prototype has a bad day.

Forbidden’s Prototype vs. the Production Supernought

	Forbidden Supernought (production)	Whistler DH prototype
Status	Shipping as a frameset today	Early proof-of-concept, one-off
Rear travel	205mm	Not disclosed
Frame origin	Purpose-built DH front and rear triangle	Dreadnought E eMTB front triangle, new rear end
Known compromise	None reported	Limited steering lock from retained battery space
Rider	Connor Fearon raced the pre-production version	Laurie Greenland, testing role
Buyable?	Yes	No

The gap between those two columns is the whole story. Forbidden already proved it can ship a competitive high-pivot DH bike. This prototype isn’t trying to replace that — it’s Forbidden keeping a second, cheaper experiment running in parallel, the kind of thing most brands do quietly in a workshop rather than at a World Cup in front of cameras.

Who Should Actually Care About This

Anyone who enjoys watching how small brands actually engineer on a budget. Forbidden didn’t hide the compromise. It raced a bike with a known steering limitation at the sport’s biggest venue of the year instead of waiting for a clean solution.

Riders following high-pivot suspension designs across the DH and enduro categories. Forbidden’s whole gravity lineup, from the Supernought to the Dreadnought E, leans on high-pivot layouts. This prototype’s rear end is unconfirmed, but the front-triangle donor bike fits that pattern.

Laurie Greenland’s fans. This is the clearest look yet at what his post-Syndicate career actually looks like — not retirement, not another factory seat, but a testing role that puts him back on a World Cup start line without the full-season grind.

Who Should Skip This

Anyone hoping to buy this exact bike. It doesn’t have a name, a spec sheet, or a release timeline. If you want a Forbidden DH bike today, the Supernought is the one that exists.

Readers wanting a race result attached to this story. This is a development story, not a results story — closer in spirit to Jackson Goldstone racing a stock V10 to defend his World title than to a podium bike check. The bike’s job at Whistler was generating data, not finishing on the box.

Anyone assuming a production Forbidden DH bike will actually reuse an eMTB front end. That’s very unlikely. This is a proof-of-concept shortcut to test ideas quickly, not a hint at how Forbidden’s next real DH frame gets built.

The Bottom Line

Forbidden found a cheap, fast way to keep its gravity program moving: strip the motor out of the Dreadnought E’s front triangle, bolt on a new rear end, and hand it to a rider who knows exactly what a DH bike is supposed to feel like. The steering compromise is real, and it’s not going away until Forbidden builds a proper DH-specific front end around whatever this prototype teaches them. But as a way to get race-pace feedback without committing to a second frame program from scratch, it’s a smart, honest shortcut — and racing it at Whistler’s first-ever World Cup, in public, with Laurie Greenland back on a start line for the first time in a while, made it a story worth noticing.

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Reporting sourced from Pinkbike’s coverage of Greenland’s Whistler prototype, Pinkbike’s report on Greenland leaving his team for 2026, NSMB’s report on Forbidden’s 2022 World Cup DH team launch, Vital MTB’s Forbidden Supernought announcement, Pinkbike’s first-ride on the Dreadnought E, and Forbidden’s official Dreadnought E product page. No test unit has been ridden by our team at time of publication.