New Tech Heating Up in Wheels and Hubs
Roaming the aisles of the Sea Otter expo last week certain themes became apparent. Performance-based discussions often focus on aerobars and how to position oneself aboard them. In a moment we’ll look at what’s happening on the bike a little closer to the ground, because there’s a lot of action here these days. But first I want to invest some paragraphs on the expo itself.
When you go to most triathlons and certainly to any IRONMAN what you see is a race, and attached to it is an expo. Some race expos have been epic, Wildflower and the Chicago Triathlon as examples. The Sea Otter Classic expo is beyond epic. Sea Otter’s owners – now the Life Time group – listened to their business, which told them the event is an expo first and a race second. Certainly there’s a lot of racing at Laguna Seca raceway during Sea Otter week, but the expo is the biggest thing at this very big event. The expo achieved critical mass and the gravitational force of it expo pulled vendors who were looking for a place to gather after the demise of the Interbike trade show.
The Sea Otter expo offers no brand exclusivity in its expo for its partners. If you’re Continental tire company – who sponsors the expo – you could either have a small expo and Vittoria and Pirelli would not be there, or a huge expo with huge traffic but competitors get to exhibit. If you make the expo too exclusive or too expensive vendors won’t come and customers won’t come either. The partners you were trying to protect won’t see the value of an insular, anemic expo. A big expo can be the engine that makes your entire race bigger, as Sea Otter demonstrates.
Below the Waist
In my parlance “above the waist” is, on a bicycle, where you find products like handlebars and saddles along with the fit coordinates that appertain thereto (seat height, handlebar elevation, stack and reach). What you find below the waist are wheels, tires, forks, all shifting and drive train components, and the geometries that appertain thereto (front center, chain stay, trail, offset, BB drop, wheelbase). You might not have noticed but there’s a lot of technical emphasis now on what happens below the waist, and I wonder if you saw the spy shots of that new BMC TT bike? It’s not for sale (yet), but it’s yet another data point on wide fork blades.
This isn’t an aero feature that happens in a vacuum. It’s one result that flows from disc brakes. When you don’t have to contemplate a rim brake caliper your wheels then tires and forks can take new and in some cases pretty wild shapes, as we see with bikes from Kú and CADEX and, now apparently, with BMC. But it’s not just the fork you can change.
Here’s the CADEX disc wheel and as we see it’s yet another hookless rim design. This is the first disc wheel made using a hookless bead, unless I’m mistaken. These wheels contemplate the use of a 28mm tire and this is *tire*some if you tow the handcart of tradition around behind you. The 25mm tire is the new 23mm, as in, not so many people race on 23mm tires on the road these days, and in 2 or 3 years 28mm tires will be the norm and we will view 25mm tires the way we now view 23mm tires. A lot of these technologies progress in tandem. I’ve been saying for a while now that 3 things are true: 28mm is the new road and tri tire width; tubeless is the new tire standard; and hookless is going to become the predominant rim standard. If I’m right it’s not that I’ve guessed right 3 times; it’s that all these technologies arrive as a package. If 25mm was to remain the standard, hookless is not appropriate for road. If we remained wedded to latex tubes for racing again hookless is not the answer.
This why Zipp and CADEX are out in front of the pack and if you look at the intro picture to this article you’ll see the hookless rim shape on the CADEX 4 spoke. As I speak to wheel and tire makers it seems to me there are 3 kinds of companies out there: those who’ve embraced hookless as a standard for road; and those who have embraced it but you just don’t know about it yet; and the minority who’ll hold back until they’re forced to change. But hookless, tubeless, wider tires all make sense if used in tandem, and they all inform the shape of forks. At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, “Don’t you see?! It’s all connected!”
One more thing about that CADEX disc. See the shape? Think you’ve seen it before? This is a shape more commonly ascribed to HED, and this has been HED’s shape for about 15 years. HED has never been the wheel seller in the volumes of, say, Zipp and DT Swiss, but this company has consistently produced tech that was ahead of its time.
Classified
Then we have Classified. What to do with this company? I demo’d this hub at Sea Otter and as I was in the booth (where I spent quite a bit of time) a pair of men from Campagnolo came over to demo this product themselves. The hubs were in bikes you could ride and the Campy guys were out on these bikes for a long time. They came back very impressed.
We have had planetary gears in bikes for decades on decades. Three-speed commuter bikes have had planetary gears forever, but they were never seen as having quite enough efficiency. Too much friction loss inside the hub. Classified is a 2-speed hub and the buzz is that the planetary gear friction problem has finally been solved.
This unleashes the strategist in me. The gears in this hub roughly conform in gear ratio to the gears produced by a pair of chain rings. In a triathlon, this gives a bike maker the ability to make a true 1x that functions as a true 2x. The front derailleur is not used, and is not contemplated in the bike’s design. There’s a small weight penalty by substituting the hub in for the FD and the weight of a 2x crank (versus a 1x). The shifting of the Classified is electronic and wireless. So…
To me, the obvious drivetrain maker is SRAM. SRAM is the master of 1x; Shimano is the leader in FD shifting. If I was SRAM I would handshake with Classified on shifter communication protocol. I could imagine, for example, SRAM Wireless Blips acting exactly as they do now, just, a simultaneous depressing of Blips shifts the Classified hub instead of the front derailleur. I could imagine a company like HED integrating a Classified hub into its 180 rear wheel, since that’s a spoked wheel and the hub anticipates use as a spoked wheel (integrating a Classified hub into a solid disc wheel might take a little doing).
The Classified hub in a tri bike has the promise of being: a more aero bike; never a missed shift; never a derailed chain.
Tires
Slowtwitch has unofficially been Conti country for some time now and Continental has earned that following. But a number of companies are starting to approach bike tires the way I perceive Continental has done business (though I have no basis for my opinion other than by observation). While Continental’s bike tires might comprise 2 percent (my rough guess) of its overall tire revenue, the financial efficiency of winning a spring classic or grand tour on its tire is huge. Conti’s bike tire program in this context could be seen as a car tire marketing exercise that makes rather than costs money.
It seems to me Pirelli and Goodyear – as examples – may have taken note. In the case of Goodyear the bike tires are a license arrangement, however in my discussions with Goodyear it appears the licensing company (the Goodyear car tire company) is keen for the bike tire to be a success and there may be funding behind that. In the case of Vittoria no, that brand (like Schwalbe) only makes bike tires. However, Vittoria has two divisions also: its own bike tire brand; and the manufacturing it does for the rest of the bike tire industry. (I believe Vittoria’s annual turnover in tire it makes for other brands exceeds $100 million.) Vittoria has profits it can leverage against the development of its own tires.
Pay attention to Goodyear, Vittoria and Pirelli (with its new manufacturing infrastructure in Italy). All these brands are in a position to invest in race-results tires that will benefit more than just their discrete bike tire brand businesses. You’ll see product news here on Slowtwitch soon on 2 of these brands and of course they’re all coming out now with high quality, low drag hookless compatible tubeless road tires.
[PHOTO: Of Sea Otter Classic Expo: Robert DeBerry Photography]
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