About the design
The 2015 season brought a new bike supplier for the team. Cervélo exited and Cannondale came aboard to supply bikes but with them they brought their branding and colour scheme too. This meant big colour changes to the kit namely blue and touches of red being replaced with Cannondale's lime green. The colour palette became lime green and black.
The design itself was similar to the previous 2013 and 2014 iterations of the Garmin sharp kit as opposed to the Cannondale kits. The green band from the previous Garmin Shap designs was kept with the Cannondale name in black lettering replcaing the previous Garmin name. A green panel that went up one sleeve, across the shoulders and down the other sleeve was visible in both long and short sleeve items. This had the Cannondale name in black added to it and the Cannondale C on the sleeves rendered in black.
The argyle pattern was kept but without the diamonds of different colour shades used in previous editions. This iteration had criss crossed solid and dotted lines to make up the argyle like pattern which covered the body and chest of the front of the jersey and the three quarters of the back.
The bibshorts also changed from blue to lime green with the main sponsors names and logos rendered in green on the black background. This worked just as well as the previous blue to provide a colour detail to the all black shorts.
The blue colour was dropped from the colour palette which increased the look greatly. The lime green and black colours alone worked with each other much better.
Another version of the kit was produced for the Tour de France and this version re-introduced the blue colour. Unfortunately the light blue did not blend so well with the lime green and the argyle detailing became something more akin to horse jockey's uniform.
The left and right sleeves now had blue bands around them as opposed to red and white bands. With the base colour now being lime green the sponsors where rendered in black. The cannondale C was now also renderded on the sleeves and the back of the jersey replacing the Cervélo é
As mentioned previously the argyle pattern was kept and on the front of the jersey returned to the 2013 configuration but on the rear of the jersey was only on the rear pocket. The lime green and light blue colouring did not really gel together as colour palette and made the argyle pattern stronger and less subtle but in our opinion did not improve the design.
The bibshorts were kept very similar to previous versions and as the light blue colouring was not used here and the colour clash was avoided to better effect.
The argyle design element along with the red and lime green colour palette made the kit seem a bit too busy and more Christmas tree, horse racing jockey like to our mind. No offence intended Mr Vaughters ;)
Kit manufacturer - Castelli
