Sea Otter Pt. 1 - Hooked on Road Wheels

This is the March of Ains podcast RC Otter episode part one. Both of this shows great supporters were at sea otter. Silka was educating writers on the likes of chain waxing and bica semlie grease. Silka also had a big job supporting all its athletes racing the lifetime grand prix. Silka athletes took four of the top ten places on the men's side and seven out of ten on the women's side including Sofia Gomez, Vija Fania getting the W. Shimano was also at the show. Big booth is always actually not a booth. More like a compound. There's a lot for them to show. Road and mountain by groups, shoes and pedals, the pro line of handlebar, stems, saddles and pose. I spent some time with laser. That's part of the Shimano family. Getting a look at its new dual core protection system. It's a high density foam that sits beneath the shell and works in conjunction with kinetic core to help the spurs energy during impact. Check out the latest tech from laser at laser sport dot us. It was a very productive sea otter 2026. The marginal gains recorder captured a bunch of interviews. So much that we will be putting out at least two shows worth. We're going to start by piggybacking off something you have heard covered on this show and on the silver YouTube channel. Josh has made some pretty firm points on why he's not in favor of hookless on road wheels. So at sea otter we wanted to give wheel makers a chance to rebut or confirm what you have heard in this space. We spoke with three brands, envy, Cadix and Mavic. Two are pro road hookless and one is not. In addition to talking to them about the topic, we also got into their brands as a whole. So, yeah, this is more than just a road hookless shell. We start with envy. One of the first with road hookless. You're going to hear from VP of marketing, Neil Shirley and VP of products, Jake Pantone. So let's roll to the envy booth at sea otter. Okay, we're in the sea otter booth for envy. I think you guys are always in the same location, which is great. Makes it easy to find Neil Shirley, Jake Pantone, both with envy here, both my contacts here at envy for quite some time. Guys, I wanted to stop mine and get caught up with envy on a number of topics. First of all, the star power that is Pogachar. Now you folks supply his wheel, the fact the whole team wheels. And I'm curious about when that guy wins and he wins a lot, what is the trickle down effect at envy in Ogden? How do you guys feel that in a week to week basis? Yeah, that's a good way to start this conversation, Michael. Well, I mean, it starts with us all being super fans and watching the racing, watching, you know, tour of Flanders, Perry Rebeye, Strata, whatever, you know, wherever the team is at and Tade. And there's, you know, when he wins, there is a significant commercial impact from that. We've seen it for really the last two to three years. This is year four with the UAE team Emirates sponsorship. So, you know, we, anything we develop with the team and anything that Tade rides, we, you know, we see really a global effect on that with the success of Poggy, but also, you know, the entire team. But I'd say even more than the commercial impact, it's that working with him and the team is really driving all of our R&D on the roadside. And that is as impactful for us as a brand, as the sales that come from, you know, winning on Sunday, selling on Monday. Sure. And what's specifically on the engineering side? Has he, has he helped with, uh, partisan envy product? Is there something that, that it really started day one when we first, uh, Jake and I and Kevin Nelson, our lead engineer showed up at Team Camp of one month after signing, you know, contract with these guys, so going into the, the 2023 season and, uh, we, we got to Team Camp and they said, Hey, you guys make handlebars, right? You know, we had signed a contract as a wheel partner and they said, you guys make handle bars, right? And we're like, yeah, like we, we need handlebars and, you know, we need one piece arrow bar. Essentially, we brought some different variations and, uh, they came out three months later, we had a one piece arrow bar, which we sell today and, you know, it's made in Ogden and a fantastic bar. Um, but that, that was the first project and then it, it turned into arrow extensions because they understood the team knows that envy has R&D, um, and kind of a, a works, workshop element to it where we can create things. We have the ability and we, we have the desire to do things that other brands cannot. And so we, uh, you know, we develop solutions for them and that's really what they come to us for. So arrow extensions, disc, disc rear wheel, 100 millimeter front wheel, which will be going to market this year, developed with the team. 4.5 pro is really another example of a huge commercial success for us that was entire, a wheeled, entirely developed, um, with the team. Do you have to have somebody full time over there, at least one person or is it more than one? Yeah. So we, uh, we have an interesting structure. I mean, envy is, uh, we're a global brand, but, you know, based in, based, based in the US, uh, there's, there's obviously so much happening in, in Europe on the racing side that it's easy to, to miss out on. So we have, um, we have a full time person in Italy that manages all, all team wheel builds, um, going back and forth to the service course and attending a lot of the events. And then we have, um, we brought on a new sports marketing manager, Matt Schreiver, who had been with Trek for 15 years, um, you know, a lot of experience working with, with the team. So we brought him on a year ago and he's doing a great job managing that, that partnership to ensure that, you know, the day to day needs are met. Oh, speaking of, of the Poker jar effect and UAE, Jake, uh, this, we're coming up on the one year anniversary of the wheel that they are kind of help push forward. And that is the SES 4.5 pro, uh, I don't know if you guys call this a semi hooked wheel, a partially hooked wheel, just another iteration of a hookedless wheel. Um, so give me an update on that wheel in particular. How, how has it been doing as a product within your line? And, and what, what exactly do you guys call it? Is it semi hooked? What is this thing? Yeah, I mean, to answer that question directly, we would say it hooked. Um, and I can go into that a little bit more in a second. I mean, the, the cool thing with the 4.5 pros that it, it's a product that was really derived based on feedback and demands from the team. So it really, you know, there's, there's progress in like the discomfort that the team put, the team, the team's requests from the R&D team, you know, to constantly be, I mean, we have to be as competitive as they are. And that means we're constantly iterating and figuring out how to make a lighter, stronger, faster product, everything from aerodynamics to, um, the weight of the wheel itself. So the 4.5 pro was a full, I mean, it's, it's definitely built upon what we'd say is like the platform of what's been a successful 4.5. Um, but it was, it was a rim up, laminate development, um, or ground up rim laminate development. It was a hub development that, you know, was based on our inner dry platform, but it was really, like, it's really a completely new hub, everything from the bearings to the actual ratchets, everything was designed to achieve a specific weight, um, that was basically going to allow the team to have lighter bikes and lighter equipment and better performance at the, the big races they participate in. And so, um, with that will, one of the opportunities we had to reduce the weight of it was to basically take weight out from underneath what was the hookless bead. Um, and it's kind of a, it's kind of a circular story to explain it fully, but with hookless in the early days, they had very narrow leading edge. So there's a couple things that the narrow leading edge of the rim would do is it was being thin, so you had a higher propensity for pinched flooding and cutting the tire if that carbon edge was sharp or narrow. And so we, we created what we've called the wide hookless bead and it was originally developed for mountain bike, but we, we gradually introduced it and, and put it on all of our will products, you know, it's just, it's scaled for the demands of the application. Um, by making a thicker wider leading edge, a broader impact point, if you will, you do reduce pinched flooding and, and you've seen this technology, um, permeate throughout the bike industry in the wheel sector, like a lot of brands are doing something similar at this point. Um, but what that does also is it adds weight because now you have more carbon in the rim itself. And well, when we were looking at the 4.5 pro rim design concept, we, we looked at it and said, well, we need the leading edge to, to maintain the pinch flat protection. Um, but there is the reality that underneath that leading edge, there's material that's necessary. And so we challenged ourselves to remove that material and create a hook bead in the process. Um, it did require a completely new manufacturing technique. So the beauty of hookless is that it does allow, it does. It does allow you to have an efficient manufacturing process that delivers most importantly a very precise and consistent bead seat dammit, which is critical for tubeless performance. What we had to challenge ourselves to do is introduce a new molding technique that allowed us to maintain those precise bead seat dammiters using hard tooling instead of soft tooling and to be able to remove that from between the hooks. That's really the challenge with using machine tooling to have hook beads in a rim. There's a lot of talk out there about a micro hook and things like that. We don't really believe in micro hook per se, like it's either hooked or it's hookless. That's not defined by envy, that's defined by ETRTO. There are specific dimensions and there's a range of those dimensions that defines what a hooked bead is or not. The 4.5 Pro is a full hooked bead and if you look at the specification defined by ETRTO, we're at the lower end of that range as far as the width of that hook bead. But it is as far as the standard is concerned a hooked bead. One of the benefits of that hook bead is that UAE or anybody who runs it can run tire pressures a little higher than they would on one of your hookless setups. That is a benefit, especially with the team where at times they are for lighter riders in certain applications or if they're trying to save weight with tires, they are on occasion. It's reduced quite a bit but there are times when they would run a 25mm tire. It seems like that's gone away at this point but if they are to run a smaller tire or they allow them to run upwards of the ETRTO max tire pressure that is defined for hookless. There are over a few cases, it's pretty rare and rider specific but yes, in effect it does allow them to run a higher pressure than that 72.5 sort of hookless. But as far as manufacturing is concerned, the same process is making a hooked carbon wheel as we've traditionally known it. I mean hookless or the original hooked wheels, I think you folks even made them for a long time. Is the manufacturing essentially going back to that idea with the pearl? Well, our original rims with hookbeads were the pre-tubeless days, used a soft silicone tooling to create that hookbead. We never, some brands would machine that shape into the rim, we never machine it or cut it out, it was always molded in. And then when we introduced hookbeads and tubeless it was really challenging to maintain a really consistent bead seat diameter with the soft pliable tooling that you needed to be able to extract the bladder from between the hookbeads because once the rim cures and you've effectively locked that molding piece in. Our process with soft tooling didn't yield the most consistent bead seat diameter. And so when we switching to hookless and using the hard machined tooling it allowed those bead seat diameter to be super precise. And so we've basically created a bit of a hybrid that allows us to still use the machined tooling or mold and still be able to extract it from between the hookbeads. So it's a different manufacturing process but the end result is sort of get our cake and heat it too which is like you get the really precise consistent bead seat diameter that's required for good tubeless performance. And we also get the extra retention that the team may need if they're running higher tire pressures. How's the reception been on that wheel on the pearl? It's been fantastic. Yeah. Is it a leading cell? Is it a top cell or is it? It's a top cell or a chair. Okay, sure. Okay. I want to talk about while we're on the topic of road hookless. I think it was here at sea otter. You guys announced one of your first road tubeless wheels. I remember being at a press event. It was offsite. You guys had written down the coast. But I want to talk about the future of road hookless. There's been some pushback in over the last year or so about hookless. There's been some very public blow off that have happened on other wheel brands. You guys were out in front of this idea of hookless technology on the road for sure. So how do you see it now? Where do we stand with road hookless? Is it going to continue to go forward as far as envy in the industry is concerned? Should we have concerns about writing it? Let's start there. Sure. I think there's a couple. There's a recipe for success with tubeless that needs to all the ingredients have to be present and accounted for in order for road tubeless to perform properly. Whether it be hooked or hookless. There has to be a speed down there needs to fall within spec. The tire bead itself has to be within a certain spec in terms of its stiffness. And then the rim itself has to have structure and stability stiffness durability that ensures that the pressure is exerted on it from the tire itself and the tire pressure. When I say the tire itself, the actual bead stiffness of the tire exerts a force on the rim that compresses the rim itself. And so you sort of need all those components to work in in unison to deliver good tubeless performance. So it's whether it's hooked or hookless and it's important that people understand that the hooked bead itself doesn't have a role in tubeless performance. The ceiling surface is that lower shoulder in the rim. So when we talk about the bead seat diameter and this little technical, but the shoulder that below the beads is where the ceiling happens. That initial shelf, as you come out of the channel, that's where you want your lock. When you inflate your rim and you hear that snap, that pop, you know, when that tire bead seats, that's those beads popping up over onto that shoulder where the secure attachment and interface between rim and tire takes place. And it's been a little bit of an emotionally charged discussion at times over the last few years, seeing those incidents where the racers on the side of the road and the tires off. But in all those instances, what you're seeing is the rim itself, the structure is failed. So whether it be hooked or hookless, if you break a rim, if you crack a rim, that bead seat diameter is no longer secure intact. And when that happens, all bets are off. So for us, it's really critical. And what we put a lot of pride in is the durability of our rims, ensuring that they can handle impacts and the race scenario. So as long as the rim itself is strong enough and you can minimize the risk of a breaking, you know, hooked or hookless, you have much better odds of the tire maintaining its retention. And so I think that's a critical component. If the rim breaks, your tire is going to come off. That's possible, not all the time. But then you get into failure mode. So you don't want that first break to, you don't want to break a rim and have it break that bead seat diameter possible. It's best if you can isolate an initial crack or failure on the rim to be just the leading edge of the rim and not have it propagate into that critical surface where the rim is. Where the tire itself is retained, if that makes sense. I think what I've seen over the last year, though, is this increasingly has become a narrative about tire pressure that somehow road tubeless, what hookless road cannot handle the higher pressures that a hooked bead can. There's a less margin for error for user error. And we know that's going to happen out there. Like people are going to say they're going to look at a rim and go, oh, I can go up to 72 or 75 or 60 or whatever it is. Pump their tires up in the cold morning to 70 go out and ride and suddenly the current tire pressure goes from 70 to 75 or higher depending on where they live and boom, you might have a blow off. Is that what does your engineering match that theory? This is an area where the bike industry, well, specifically the will and tire manufacturers have made great, great progress. This is good. What's another critical component to a tubeless performance? And that's the bead stiffness of the tire itself. And so early on, we realized that there is a critical component that like the tire beads themselves have to be strong enough to not stretch off of the bead seat diameter of the rim under pressure. And so we implemented and developed our own protocol for tire qualification to ensure that the bead of the tire itself was the tire itself was capable to maintain that tubeless sill. And part of that is an established margin of safety that is a good example of the tire. We can say, okay, yeah, if the wheel sits in a hot car or if the tarmac's hot that day, or if somebody's pump gauges is a little off or 20% off that, you know, they're not going to be always walking this fine line of will the tire all the sudden rupture because it's exceeded its ability to maintain retention on the rim. And so, there's a, what we've seen over the last years is the modern tubeless road tires have appropriately built beads to maintain pressures far beyond the ETRTO maximum recommended pressure of about 4.5 bar ADPSI or 72.5 PSI. So in our testing, we, we, we have had to do much less of it in the recent years, but, you know, we, we very regularly see tires that basically achieve 140 PSI before they come off a rim. So there's, there's a, there's a large margin of safety with a quality built tubeless tire that gives us a high level of confidence in our testing protocols that, you know, ensure that, you know, when a customer buys an NV rim and pairs it with one of the tires that we have approved for use on a hookless, on our hookless rims, that the customer is, is going to have a good experience and be safe. As long as they follow the general tire pressure recommendation guidelines. Yeah. So, yeah, it feels like people are walking up to the edge a little too much with not just tire wheels, but a lot of, a lot of bike products that just weren't engineered for that level of stress or what have you. You wouldn't take the road bike and ride it down the chunky single track on the world, right? Just be careful with your tire pressure, please. No matter what, no matter with your running hooked or hookless, you got to, you kind of got to watch things. Yeah, I think, I think that's an important consideration for a consumer. Like if, if there, there's a couple things like if you're a larger rider that is walking up to the line of that, say, let's just say 72.5 PSI and you feel like you need more. There's a couple considerations. Usually it would be recommended to go up in tire volume. So if you're running a 28, for example, and you feel like you need to run more than 72.5 PSI in a 28, like it's probably a better idea for you to be on a 30 millimeter tire, for example. Now you can bring that tire pressure down a little bit and still get the, get the, get probably get more performance out of it. Better rolling resistance, all the traction, more comfort, all those things. This may be a comment, no comment question for you. Boy, I have hardly been on the CR2 ground here yet. So I haven't seen everything out there, but I betting I'm going to see a lot of 32 inch product, wheels, tires, bikes. You're a big time wheel maker. What do you see here? Is this, is this a part of Envy's future? Is it part of the future period? Give us, give us your take on 32 inch. Our take on 32 inches in the world of marginal gains. It's very interesting. And it's something that we're evaluating at this time. And well, do you think it has a future then? Does that mean yes? There's a future there. There's growth. There's a reason to be in this. Yeah, I would say we're like, we're pretty early days in our exploration of what 32 inches is really going to mean to Envy, but in the limited experience I have with it personally, I see it as part of the future of the bike industry. Yeah. Or Jake, thanks for the bit we lost Neil. He had to, yeah, he went away. He got pulled away. I guess he got bored with us. All that talk, all that talk about the hook list is he's like, I'm out. I know. Well, I appreciate your time and have a great show. Thanks again to Jake and Neil at Envy. Not far from the giant booth was Cadix wheels. And that's for good reason. Cadix and giant live bikes are co-brands. The Cadix line of wheels is nowhere near as big as Envy's, but the company's share a philosophy when it comes to hookless road. Get a product development. Jeff Schneider takes us through the history of the line and makes a case for securing a tire tool wheel without a hooked rim. Jeff, thanks for coming on. I know you've heard about our show. Yeah, I know you've heard. I know you've heard about some of our claims about hookless. So I thank you for coming on. We're going to talk about hookless technology with Jeff in a bit. But first of all, just Cadix. I think some people may know it. They probably see it on giant bikes, but they also see it kind of working on its own. So tell us a little bit about Cadix. So to start off, I mean, Cadix, for the old timers, they're going to know Cadix from back in the 80s. Our CEO at the time, Tony Low, carbon was just coming in line. He had a dream and he called it a moonshot. He wanted to be the first company to do full production carbon bikes. So Cadix was that brand. It only lasted for a few years because then carbon went mainstream into all bikes. But back in the day, Cadix was our moonshot to do something different. So back in about 2016-17, we were working with the Sunweb team. We had them on all of our products and the thought came up. Let's make the ultimate race wheel for the team. So the same moniker as a product guy. This is obviously a fun one because it was a blue sky project. We don't care how much it cost. We don't care how much the price is at the retail. We don't care if you make money in the first several years, just make the best product. So our tagline became the pursuit of pinnacle product. That was our goal. We wanted to make the best possible wheel we could. So we started playing around with different things. Technology, as it came out, was our dynamic balance lacing or DBL. I don't know if you're familiar with that. But being somebody who's been in the industry, I've worked for Shimano, I've worked for Eastern. It's changing the pushing and pulling spoke leverage angles on the hubs so that you don't get the wind up in the hubs. So what happens is efficiency wise, and this goes back to steel spokes when we started, you would stretch the pulling spoke quicker than the pushing spoke could actually decompress and allow the hub to rotate before it dragged the rim around. So great noticeable difference in steel spokes, but once you jump to carbon, and this jumps ahead when we start when we were doing critics, in 2018 we were supposed to launch. We moved it to 2019. I wasn't happy with what the result was to that point. I said no, we need to come up with something different. We started doing the carbon spoke development. And the benefit there was the elongation properties of carbon, obviously, are way better than steel. They don't stretch. So instant notification. I mean, it's the first thing that when riders get on the wheels and ride, and I know it's hard to say you have to ride them to understand them, but when our pro riders would get on them, that was the first thing they noticed. It's like, you got to tell me about this because when I push, I go. And so that's the biggest moniker. On top of that, you're reducing the weight of the spokes by about 48%, 50%. So we don't really factor in the total weight of the wheel for us. It's rotational weight because that's what adds to efficiency of the rider. If we can make it lighter, we will. But I'd rather have a durable hub at the center with a good spoke and a lighter weight rim that brings it around so that you're actually peddling less to move the bike. So Cadix does have, I mean, how would you describe your association with giant? Is it your own by giant? Is it brother sister? What's that relationship? We are owned by the giant group. Just like we have giant, we have live, we have momentum. Those are brands. We own now stages. They're a brand. Cadix was started as its own independent brand within the company. We limit the amount of spec that can go on giant bikes and live bikes. We limit it to their top level bikes only because our target is aftermarket and we want to get into the bespoke brand builder business. So the bottom line is these wheels can be purchased no matter what bike you ride. If you want to get it except a wheels on it, you can get them. How broad is the line as it stands right now? So we started off with road. We launched with two tires or two wheels initially. A lot of people might remember we launched in 2019 at the Tour de France with CCC. We had a 65 and a 42. They were narrower. In 2019.5 because that's what everybody else was doing. But very rapidly we changed the setup and we started launching wider rims. At the time 22.5 was considered wide for road. I'm a huge proponent for bigger tires, wider widths. I come from mountain biking. So I'm a believer in efficiency in that direction. And I know aerodynamics is efficient. But I do believe that for most riders what they notice the most is the efficiency they get out of a proper wheel and tire setup. Because when you get on a bike it's all about position of the rider. Not everybody can hold that position. So we came out, we revamped the line, changed a few things, went to wider rims. We were already starting to see the move into like 25 and then 28 millimeter tires. So. I was tuning the horn back then. We should go 30 and 32, but I get a lot to tire width. - Yeah, tire width wise. So we started in road. That was the premium area 'cause we saw the biggest benefit there. About four years ago, that was during COVID, we launched our first gravel wheel, which is a 25 internal with 35 deep wheel. And it was good. We came out with tires, but our tires rapidly became not good enough for the gravel guys 'cause they were all riding 50s, 45s and 50s, and we made a 40. So it was too small. So that's where we're at today. We have some new stuff that we're working on for gravel this year, that we'll launch later this year. You know, with the end game, if you add it up, we've signed on Giant Alan Hadlerley, two time world champion for a cross country. We are working with him on finding the optimal wheel, so we rapidly found that maybe the technology we use on the road is not what they need on the mountain. So we're now modifying the wheels, and hopefully you'll see it later this year. - You're under the J-co team on the board tour, correct? - Yep, we're with the J-co. - Okay. And as far as the road line up goes, you have, as we see here, kind of 240s, two different versions of a 40 mil, two different versions of a 50. There's a disc wheel, I imagine. Disc wheel, and then we have a four spoke both front and rear, but that's more prominently used in like triathlon. So within the 40 or 50 depths, you have two different types of wheels. You have the ultra and the max. What are the differences there? - So ultra is a carbon spoke, but it's traditionally laced up. It's still a spoke that you can replace a spoke if you break it. The max is a one piece flange and spoke system. It just, it maximizes that transmission stiffness that we're pushing for to get the efficiency. It doesn't affect the comfort of the wheel at all, but the lateral stiffness to make the bike snappier. Like when I talked to editors, the first thing when they rode the 40, the best description was a guy named David Arthur. I don't know if you know David. David said, he said, the Cadix max wheel is to Cadix. What the Cadix wheel was to a standard steel spoke wheel. It just, he said, it's a completely different game. We're keeping him in the lineup. We're now, we now have him at different price points. Ultimately, you're probably gonna see the pure spoke system go away and we're exploring other technologies to try to come up with new ways of lacing the wheel. And it depends on the discipline, really. - Okay. - And your pro riders, they will ride either. - They will ride either of them. Right now for the team, the Ultra 50 has been the wheel of choice. It's aerodynamic, but it's light. You can climb with them. It gives them everything they need. They ride it on the giant propel. And they just like the setup. They just got at a parry knees. They just got the 50s for the first time. With the new propel, the team launched. So you'll probably see a pretty rapid push to that. We had a few guys that stuck on the 65s for a while, but I kept telling them guys you gotta ride this one that's faster than the 65. This is aerodynamically is a better wheel. - Okay. - I wanna get the aerodynamics. These wheels are premium wheels. The price, that price tag says that. Like we use, nothing is below $3,000 here. - No, no. And that was our goal. It was gonna be the best. Maybe somewhere, I wanna establish the brand. I wanna establish our position. Maybe down the road, we'll do a third tier. But right now the goal would be we would have two tier. We would have the max and the ultra. And then a lot of people within the company think Kitex has to be carbon. And I say it doesn't. If somebody can make me a titanium rim today that beat these, I'd go that route. Because it would make sense. But until that happens, we'll stick with carbon. Okay. Tell me where the aerodynamics thing fits into your folks. Testing and development. How does that plan? - So every bike and product that we develop gets tested pretty thoroughly in a wind tunnel. We used to have a contract with a company called ACE in France. We hired the aerodynamicist out of that and he works full time within the giant group and he supports all brands. So we're in wind tunnels. I would say on average every month we've got something going through the wind tunnel. Whether it's giant and live helmets, giant even shoes. We do testing on. It's our handlebars, it's our wheels. Everything goes through the wind tunnel and gets validated. And we typically will compare that. Normally it's like three or four different brands. We'll pick the top three or four. When we did the ultra 50, we had 11, well we had 12 wheels in the test. The benchmark was our force boat because that was the fastest in the test. So we benchmarked the 50 to the force boat wheel and then everybody else to that same standard. Obviously tires make a big variable. A lot of people don't think of this, but the tire shape makes a massive difference in what you can do in the tread design. Makes a big difference. We started doing shaping of the tires actually almost egg shape. And that made a massive difference. We were seeing like five, six percent gains in improvement on just aerodynamics by doing that. Now we have our new aerotire, which couples with the new max 50, which has the same shape, but at the same time we've totally changed the tread design. We have 64 perpendicular cipes in the wheels. That makes a big difference in what that does. Because we test all of our wheels plus or minus 20 to 30 yin. We don't care. We know everybody can kind of focus here. It's the side yin angles that really start to affect you. And what those cipes do is they actually reduce the lateral. So when you see a normal bell curve of a test tire, when you get into the wider your iron angles, your wattage goes up. And we started to flatten that curve now. Now with aerodynamics in mind, you were telling me before we started recording that you thought the gains in aerodynamics when it comes to wheels for reaching, or what we're getting down to very minuscule points. And you think there's some other bigger gains to be had when it comes to wheels and tires? Yeah, I mean everybody's testing in the wind tunnel now. And what we started seeing, and there was a point in time when we were testing that if we were two watts faster than the best competitor, you're like, we're fast. Because the wind tunnels at the time that we were working with AC, their margin of error was like plus or minus one watt. Plus or minus a half a watt, I think, is what they would try to tell you. But we knew it was around one watt. We were seeing that a lot of the shaping of the rims was pretty much the same across the board. That's where we started getting into the tire development because we were seeing jumps that were significantly bigger with the tires. Like when we launched the ultra 50, like I said, we tested that against 11 other competitor wheels. We went out bottom, put in the wind tunnel test, we tested them. If the company didn't make a tire, we used either a conti. If that's what their team road, or we used a Victoria, if that's what their team road. In that test, we did all the comparison of our system to their system. Once we did that, we took all of their wheels and put our tire on their wheel and compared them across the board. And it was pretty interesting to see that once we put our arrow tire on other people's wheels, the gain in aerodynamics for their wheel went up. Probably shouldn't be saying that because then people just buy my tires. [LAUGHTER] But I mean, it's crazy the advantage that you get from the tire. And it is the leading edge of the system. A wheel company doing tires has banned-- seems kind of hitter-missed. We know Zip tried it early on. I actually like their tires at Tangente, or whatever they call that thing. I like that thing. Envious tried it. Where is it? How are you feeling about K-Dex and trying to combine tires and wheels together as a package? Well, so that comes into-- if you want to go into the hook list now-- that comes into the complete package. Obviously, we don't make our tires. Nobody makes their own tires. There's only a handful of manufacturers. But we partner with people we work very closely in what we're trying to accomplish. So when it came to hook list, we knew we had to make our own tire. Because we had tolerances that we weren't seeing in the industry for tires. I know a lot of people like to blame hook list for any time. There's a blow off or saying, oh, you have to run less air pressure. And if you look at ETRTO standards, it's driven by the tire industry. It's not driven by the wheel industry. It is a tire-- I'm going to call it a standard, or a guideline. ETRTO is, if you take the measurements, it's plus or minus 622 plus or minus 0.5 millimeters. All of our wheels are made 622 plus or minus 0.3 millimeters. And when we first started Kitex, we knew we couldn't just make our tires. We had to be compatible with everybody else's. So every manufacturer-- so we didn't give a tire to specialize because they don't make their tire, they're like us. We didn't give it to track, but we went to Continental. We went to Schwalve, we went to Vittoria, we went to Hutchinson. The guys that make the tires, we said, "Here's our wheel, here's our tire. We can run 125 psi in our tire if you really want to. Our B doesn't stretch, we don't have that stretch." Every wheel that we gave them was the minus 0.3 millimeter because we wanted to test the worst case scenario. When we said, "If you can make your tire pump up to this pressure and stay on our rim for this long, then you all you got to do is send a six of each model you want tested in each size. We will do our test and we will approve your tires." There wasn't a lot that passed the test in the beginning. I would say now today, pretty much everybody meets that standard and there's one or two that don't. And I'm not going to mention names because I don't like doing that, but they're one or two that we have that problem with. And most of them have really stepped up to bat. I mean, giving an indication, Vittoria did not pass our test at the beginning. We now partner with them to make our cotton tire because they made the changes and they understood what we were trying to do. The rim is not the problem because all rims, whether it's hooked or hooked or hucleus or microhook, they all have to be made at their manufacturer at pretty tight tolerances. So there's variables that might change that, but if you have a proper bead seat and if you think of pneumatic systems, it's bicycle is the only one that requires a hook for history. But that you also had an inner tube that held the tire onto the bead and as a counterbalance to that. But when you look at a tire, a tire is a composite product and one batch to the next, your bead can be very, very different. They can shrink, it can grow and we've all experienced when you put a tire on your bike as impossible to put on. You're out on the road and you get a flat and you go to change the flat and it just falls off your rim and you're like, "What the hell? That wasn't that easy before and you can put it back on by hand." So I think the design of the rim makes a big difference. Like every kid X wheel, I can hand mount our tires by hand on the tire and pump it up with a floor pump. I did that when we launched, I did like 45 sets of wheels by hand with a floor pump in Brussels. But you have to maintain that shelf that the tire has to lock on to. That's the biggest, biggest variable. How about messaging though with a public? It seems to be a constant battle, especially for the wheel makers who believe in hookless of that they have to constantly be educating their users on how to use the product, how much error can handle. Is that still a thing? Do you still have to maintain that level of endurance? It's still a thing. We're trying to get off the defensive side of it and be more proactive in how we do it. Like I said, a kid X tire that we have have been tested to 125 psi and I feel confident you do. If you don't go above 72.5psi, pretty much every tire will stay on our room with no problem. But you have to get people to understand that. If you want to use our tire we do have weight guidance that is going to help you get the results. If you stick within the ETRTO guidelines for hookless, you don't go above 72.5psi. Pretty much every tire will stay on our room with no problem. If you want to use our tire, we do have weight guidance. If you really want to, you can run more air pressure. But we don't think that has to happen. I would say the biggest move in the last year and a half to two years as we're seeing tires get bigger even in the pro peloton. I mean, our JCo team is asking me if we'll have 32s of our arrow cotton because they want to start racing that every day. The peloton is moving and if you understand tires, the pressure at 32 can be significantly low and give you the exact same ride feel as you get out of a 25 at a much higher air pressure. People have to understand the volume there but the surface pressure remains the same. A lower air pressure in a bigger volume gives you the same surface pressure on the tire. So in other words, if you go with bigger tires, you need to drop your pressure. That's the message. Yeah, I don't have the exact numbers in my head right now. But if you, let's say you run a 25 at 80 PSI. If you go to a 30, you probably can get down into the low 70s or high 60s and you'll be fine. But not only could you should you should to stay within the spec that you folks and other folks have set. Yeah, safety spec. I'm talking about safety spec. Yeah. How much does impact and changes in road surface or surface at all change in a pressure within the tire doesn't have that much of a fact like whenever you push on an object, if I pick up this bicycle wheel over here push down on it, I would think the effect of pressure would get higher in the tire. Is that happening? Is that oscillation occurring? It gets higher but the tire is deforming to absorb that object where normally you would hit it and go over that object. I mean, we were talking about aerodynamics and efficiency. My background is structural engineering and physics. So if you understand vector movement, the goal of a rider is to always be going forward. And we've all experienced that when you hit a rough road, chip and seal gravel or cobbles, you have to pedal harder to go faster or to keep your to maintain your speed. Why is that? It's because your vector of movement is no longer going forward. It's going slightly upward. So you're constantly fighting that motion of being forced upward as you ride the bike. So the beauty of a supple casing and I'm not against rolling resistance and I think rolling resistance has a play. But when you look at rolling resistance, there's also negatives to rolling resistance because in order to reduce the friction to get lower rolling resistance, you have to give up grip. And yes, you can compensate that with different compounds and multiple compounds, but you're still giving up something. And so a supple casing larger air or larger tire with higher air volume, but lower air in it helps you fly over the stuff. And actually, if you can shorten that contact patch and widen it makes a big difference in rolling resistance. The cool thing is we've kind of steered away because let's face it, our earlier tires like the classics and their early races sucked on rolling resistance calm. We got hammered. The new arrow cotton tire just became the number one cotton tire on their website. And it makes me feel a lot better because our new nylon casing arrow tire that we just launched is we know is better than that tire. Even Vittoria has done the test with the team testing our tire to their team, but their tire because the team rides both depending on availability of product and everything. And they even said our tire beat their tire. So I'm not saying rolling resistance is negative. I'm just saying I don't think it's everything. And if I summarize in everything aerodynamics is a part of it. I think that vibration reduction or accept by a color vibration acceleration is is a part of it. And I think the compliance of the tire and how it reacts to the surfaces of difference. Then you toss into that the complete wheel system and what we do with our dynamic balance lacing to stiffen up the pedaling of the bike. All those things add up so it's not just if you focus on aerodynamics you might fail here. If you focus on just this you might fail in aerodynamics. You got to look at all the variables that I think create efficiency. Do you see a point where I mean I've noticed in the last year though getting back to hook voice a lot of pushback on hookless road technology. It felt like the public were starting to really turn against it now. I can only read what I read and see what I see. I can't talk to every writer in the universe who knows. Is there a point you think the wheel industry would have to go okay we've we fought the fight but the public has spoken. I'm going to say I hope not but to be honest with you in our world we're so focused on what people are saying in the industry that I think we get muddied I'm out in the field talking to dealers and consumers. I don't get those questions like we we prepared a full two page. The thing that we wanted our staff to use in case consumers or media ask questions and I asked everybody yesterday nobody's had to use it yet nobody's asking us. Except for you I think it's there's a lot of myths about hookless and why we do hookless and I know it's been said we do it because it's cheaper it's not cheaper you still got to cut a steel tool to mold your tire or to mold your rim. But what it does do and if you understand how how rims are made now technology is getting better but in the old school way in order to form that hook you had to have a piece you had to extract out so you had to break the fiber to extract that piece out that created that shape. So you didn't have a continuity of fiber going up and over the the bead wall we can create a lighter stronger bead on our rim. So it has nothing to do with costs it's about making the best overall performing product. Maybe slight costs is is a benefit and somewhere in the lineup but maybe it lets us invest in our carbon spokes and make them better it's definitely not it has never been a discussion oh we can make these for cheaper and then sell them for a lot more that's not our goal. We believe it makes a better will. I want to thank you for addressing the elephant in the room I appreciate that and giving me a little bit of a big hug. a little less on the Cadix, it's my first real in-depth exposure to the brand. It's been a good story and an interesting one. Thanks for coming on the show. - Yeah, love it, thanks. - Thanks again to Jeff at Cadix for the time. Mavic's a name we all know, not so long ago, they were partnered with our first guest Envy, but recent times have not been so great for the yellow and black. So I was curious to hear what is happening with the brand. In North America, Joshua Sacks is in charge of reinvigorating Mavic. - Joshua, I think you get a kick out of this. I did a Mavic count, my personal Mavic count over my life as a cyclist, and here's what I came up with. I have owned three sets of Syrians, two custom open pros, one set of Cosmics, and I still have a set of all roads, and I don't know that I've remembered it all. - Yeah, right? - That's a lot of wheels. - That's a lot of Mavic wheels over a fair, you know, 22 year span or so. And I think a lot of people would have a lot of serious cyclists could tell a similar story about their experience with Mavic over time, right? - Absolutely, there's a lot of history with the brand. It's 137 years old this year, so it's hard to say that at some point in a history cyclist career, they haven't been on Mavic at some point. And those who are coming in newer, maybe haven't discovered us yet, but we're present everywhere in the industry, so it's hard to stay away. - Right, and that gets me to my first question. It's like, okay, where Mavic has been, where it's now, and kind of in between. I know, you know, again, for a while, OEM, even aftermarket wheels, like you were really gravitating to a Mavic, and then there seemed to be, the space got really crowded, and decisions got to be harder about what wheels to go with, and it kind of put Mavic kind of elbow to the side, here in the States, at least, I have no idea what's going on in Europe, but here in the States, Mavic got elbow to, is that a fair assessment of what happened here in the Mavic's presence? - I think a little bit, a large part of Mavic's presence in the US is a result of the company going into receivership in 2020. The company, effectively filed for chapter 11, and was purchased out of the receivership by a French family investment group, the Borlai Group, heavily invested, not just financially, but personally in the company that participate, in meetings and development, in strategy, in Europe, but in that purchase, it was effectively a mass contraction of business. So global subsidiaries closed, except for France, except for Japan, and about three years later in 2023, was the point of expansion. So we're following COVID, we're following, being able to put a wheel outside of your door, and somebody saying, "I need to buy that wheel," because demand was so high. And in 2023, Mavic opened a new US subsidiary, which I now lead and manage, along with our Mavic service center, so that we can service, warranty, have support parts. That was our phase one. US had been without that support for three years, some felt like maybe it felt a little longer in that limbo. But that was the first thing we brought back. And in our scale-up, we now have somebody who manages our e-commerce, our marketing, and they're a specialist in that. So they're making sure that we're advertising in the right places, that it is becoming visible. It's why we're here at Sea Otter. This is a large part of our activation and our visibility for the brand, as we rebuild. So three years into that new subsidiary, things are going okay. I think the market's in some difficulty, and there's a lot of choices out there. So from the Mavic perspective, we need to make sure our technologies are valid and are known, and our innovations are continuous. I really like to joke Mavic's reinvented the wheel hundreds of times in 137 years. Let's do it one more, you know? - Just give me a quick thumbnail of the size of the brand now. How many different types of wheels do you have, than what areas are you all trying to cover? - Yeah, Mavic is in every category of cycling right now, aside from maybe 20 and 24 inch wheels. We still make a 26 inch wheel, but we are doing cross country, Enduro, Downhill, Trail, we are in gravel, we are in road, we are in road race, we are in gravel race, we are in time trial, we are in track. We play everywhere, we are the wheel brand. So there's nowhere we can't play. - And I can still get my open pros. - You can still get your open pros. - Yeah, you can still get open pros. - And set a seriams, by the way, that will cut my air in here in the booth folks is a set of seriams that are silver, they're really beautiful. - Silver seriams are back. It's a limited edition, and I hope they're popular enough, we can keep them around. - Right. - We even introduced a yellow D-Max in 2024 that was so popular, it stuck, and now it's a permanent part of the lineup. - So. - Well, let's talk about going fast, we're gonna focus a bit on road wheels here. Give us a Mavic's idea about building the fastest wheel, the most aerodynamic wheel possible. What kind of steps do you folks get through in developing a fast wheel? - Yeah, so Mavic does a lot of aero testing at the Wind Tunnel at Geneva University, which is about 30 minutes from the headquarters in Chavano. We have our own standard of testing, so it's really a point of validation that we will bring the competition in, we will set some benchmarks and make sure that in our aero testing, in this case, that we are matching or exceeding at all yaw angles possible. So we do a lot of that type of aero testing, we're looking at practical matters too, so making sure that things like the tire is lining up with the rim in the right way, and then looking at the tire profile. So historically, we've used the NACA aero profile as our basis for our rim profiles, and then adding different feature apps like internal width, external width, spokes, styles and dimensions. We use an elliptical spoke that's proven to be faster, but we forego internal nipples for the sake of serviceability. So we do make some sacrifices in honor of having practicality, serviceability, and effect on real world performance. Let's now talk about an area that has increasingly become a hot topic in the road space, and that is hooked versus hookedless. It seems like a divided world out there, and I wanted to make sure I come by and talk to a heritage brand about this, and see where you folks stand on this area. What does Mavic use as far as helping secure a tire to rim in a road setting? Yeah, everything Mavic does for the road is hooked. Whether it's tubeless, whether it's tubed, it uses that hook. It effectively offers an extra point of retention when the tire and rim mesh well together, that bead is sitting at the lowest portion of the rim bridge. But when certain elements begin to exceed, the tendency is for it to try to hop up, and it likes to slide up, and if there's nothing to catch it, it's going to exceed over the edge of that sidewall. So we retain hooks on all of our road product. When we look at our gravel product, I like to say drop-bar product. We go to hookless because the pressures are lower. We're comfortable with what we have when the standards and tolerances and recommended use cases are followed, but we will be rolling out hooks in the future on gravel product. We recognize its importance there, and multi-use of that drop-bar category of product that it is often used on the road at higher pressures that will often exceed what a perfect hookless system can operate at. We do retain hookless on our mountain bike product. We believe at lower pressures, it's perfectly fine. It's really a non-issue. We do implore something called pinch-flat protection, which does offer a micro hook on our aluminum product, but it's not a full hook setup. And that's more to help prevent against sidewall pinch flats in the tubeless setup against high impact. Is hooked more expensive and harder to make, as some might say? I don't believe it is, I think, in the early onset of hookless. There was a less expensive way to do it because it requires less. Doesn't have a hook. You remove a part of the system. Yeah, it's going to be less expensive to make, but I think when you weigh in volume pieces and how the manufacturing goes about, the balance is out pretty well. So if you're doing all hooks, that cost is well balanced. You know, when I first interviewed Maverick several years ago, I think we launched the All Road that came out. I spent a lot of time talking with Maverick about their belief in standards. I think they were some of the first with UST mountain bike wheels, and they continued to back the ETRTO standard when it first launched the All Road. Is that Maverick? Are they still a proponent of standards and sticking within standards? Absolutely. Maverick is a proponent of what we like to call a global wheel system. As you move up through the ranks of Maverick's franchise names and models, the-- The system becomes more apparent. So you have your basic pierced and lace traditional nipple-spoke interfaces. As you move up, things become more proprietary and work well together. Creating a standardization that is meant to have integrity, durability, and make a better faster, safer wheel. So when we look at things like tubeless, the ETRTO standard is largely based on the work that Mavic did with USD in which the interface of the rim is meant to be dynamic with the tire. They're meant to match. And if they don't, that's where tubeless typically can go wrong. That's where hookless could go wrong. If everything matches, it works great. If we're within pressure, it works great. When elements don't match up, whether it's a tolerance issue, whether it's been overinflated, that's where the problems come in. So we do believe in the global system. We do put forward standards in following ETRTO. On all of our rims, we print, this is the minimum tire size and the maximum pressure. And that's a safety number. And then there's maximum pressure and a minimum, sorry, maximum tire size and a minimum pressure. And that's more of a comfort. There's no real point that a minimum pressure is going to be a safety concern. You're not going to have much fun. So if you're actually going out to ride, you're going to have air in your tires. There's a good portion of folks and understandably so. Here are the words standards or rules and say, well, those are in conflict with speed and going fast. Do you see I-Lize to lay down rules? Some of them kind of bizarre that can restrict innovation and going fast. I think several years ago when I was here talking to wheelmakers about standards for tubeless, one of the arguments against was or one of the hold-ups was we're unable to innovate under the guise of standards. What is Mavic's view on that? I think we've been able to innovate in different ways. We look at, I think when we hit those types of road box, we look at how the system interacts with itself. There are all these different elements that we want to operate effectively as a single unit. So that's where we start to look. We look, what can we do with shape of the rim? What can we do with different shaped spokes, different types of nipples, different interfaces and connections of the hub? And ultimately, how you land on something like an elliptical-shaped spoke is a small marginal gain that gets you forward in your product without exceeding the limitations that have been put on by a governing body. Tell me about the spoke, by the way. You've mentioned it a couple times. The Syrium spoke, I remember, was the one that all blew our minds because it was that bladed look. It was very cool. We all suppose it was working your hard benefit. What's the elliptical spoke? So an elliptical spoke utilizes an elliptical shape to the spoke instead of being just a pressed flat blade. It has quite literally an elliptical shape to it. So it looks more like an airplane wing than it does anything else. So you can feel that that has an elliptical spoke to it as opposed to this is our SL level aluminum that I earn. S level all road aluminum wheel that I have my hand on. This is perfectly flat. It's just a pressed steel spoke. An elliptical requires shaping that does reduce the drag because an elliptical shape is more aerodynamic than just a flat profile. Originally that spoke was only available with our four systems, so either for aluminum or for carbon, which allows tubeless, tapeless technology. What we now have is if we look at something like our all road SL, this is traditional Pearson lace with a traditional nipple and an elliptical spoke. And we're able to do that because of the innovation of the hub and how you slot in that flat blade into the hub itself. Thanks again to Joshua of Mavic and everyone who took time to share their thoughts. Hope you got something out of hearing from the other side of this debate. Ultimately you writers will decide what gets made, whether it's hook or hookwess. Okay, we have more Seattle content to come so say tuned. We also owe you an astrosheniting episode. So get your questions to us and we'll get you those answers. Thanks again for listening to Marginal Games.