AJA #52: Protocol Tire Tech-Cargo Bibs-Long Sleeves for Aero

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT: 

Hottie (00:54)
It is the Marginal Gains Podcast that makes a big deal about the little things and how those little things can be a big deal. I am Hottie here with Josh Poertner, CEO of SILCA and co-host Fatty. Welcome, guys. Hello.

Josh (01:08)
Hello.

Hottie (01:09)
this is the 52nd edition of our famous Ask Josh Anything episodes. And I'm going to take a leaf from Fatty's playbook and jump the line with what I think.

We're all eager to talk about that is SILCA's tires. this is so exciting. I was so happy to hear this news. I could smell the rubber coming all the way from Indiana, Josh. That's how excited I was. You know how much I love the smell of rubber. So but specifically, Josh, I want to talk about something I think we talked about on this show early on its days. I can't remember if we recorded it or not. And I was asking about radial casings and why, you know, they exist on car tires.

But not on bike tires. And I think your answer at the time was, well, structural integrity, Hottie, getting sidewall stability without using like a steel belt or something like that was a real issue for bike tires. So, Josh, what has changed? We're now seeing not only you but other companies kind of promote that they have radial tires. What what's happening here? We got weightier materials going on. What's what's happening here that it's allowing

Josh (02:12)
Well

Hottie (02:13)
you and other companies to do this?

Josh (02:14)
Yeah, so so we're not radial. we're just not forty-five is is kind of our story there. So yeah, the the

Hottie (02:21)
Mm-hmm.

Josh (02:21)
so-called radial in cycling is between seventy and seventy-five degrees. So it's not true radial. you know, we I think we're the first company ever to build like a design of experiments of t and test it. So we you know, every tire

basically ever made is plus minus forty-five degree bias ply casing. And they do that because it's symmetric. i it it is much easier to make in the factory. The the ply cutting machines come from the factory set up at plus minus forty-five. it it gives you great material efficiency. I mean there's all these kind of manufacturing reasons to do it. Basically it's cheaper and it's easy and it it builds great tires. But yeah looking at the 70 and 75 degree

quote unquote radial tires and riding them. They're good at some things, they're bad at others. But, you know, it just got me thinking, like, well, shit, forty five can't be the right answer. I mean, there's gotta be different answers for different sizes of tires for different use cases. And so we we did every five degrees from thirty to eighty, in in our tire testing and rode them and it was it was pretty awesome. I mean, at thirty, they're basically unrideable. you know, it's like

Things happening in the contact patch are pulling on casing fibers that are, you know, hitting hitting the bead like, you know, ten, fifteen degrees away from your steering axis. And so y like you literally could not ride those tires in a straight line. I think we put Dylan Johnson on it. I think he wrote it I I kid you not, probably two hundred f feet, turned around, came back, and he just goes, That's fucking scary. Like

Hottie (04:01)
Yeah.

Josh (04:02)
you just couldn't ride straight. It just

the contact patch literally could steer the wheel. and then similarly when you got really steep, you lose longitudinal stability. And so you get out of the settle saddle and pedal, and it just feels like this giant delay, like like you're just pedaling into mush and then it the the bike would kind of go forward. And so everybody hated that feeling as well. So we we found efficiency

North of forty-five. I we've I've been joking that it's it's between forty-two and sixty-nine is is where we landed. And and we found different angles for our road tires than for our gravel tires, because we just found different peak efficiency at at different angles. So we're not saying what the number is, so that all of our competitors have to just go buy them if they want to figure it out.

Hottie (04:57)
Yeah.

Josh (04:58)
But

but yeah, it to to my belief and understanding, we're the first series of tires with true ply angle optimization by tire like model and use. we just I it I don't believe that's ever been done by any company and I think that's kinda cool.

Hottie (05:20)
I had one tire maker tell me at Sea Otter who had what they call bias ply, we know it's not true bias ply, tell me that the one thing the user has to get used to was running a little more pressure than they had been in traditional tires. Is that what you have found?

Josh (05:36)
Yeah, we're we actually added it to our tire pressure calculator. and and so we we are actually true bias ply, so it's not it's not radial. but the bias ply is just you know, having two angles essentially. but yeah, like when you find the sweet spot and then also, you know, we're using a really hyper efficient rubber, incredibly low hysteresis rubber. And the combination of those two things

there's just l much less natural stiffness in the tire itself. And so we're we're finding, you know, couple percent higher tire pressure r required and or probably on the order of five percent higher. We built it into the tire pressure calculator, but yeah, for for most of the tires I've been running it's like two psi higher maybe, maybe three.

to get to get the feel back to what you expect. And then we also worked with Wheel Energy in Finland. You know, we tested over 400 variants with them, which was quite entertaining and expensive. But but we actually found on their machine, because they can see th they use a pneumatic cylinder to load the tire. And so you can see breakpoint. and we find that the breakpoint on their machine, it's clearly not the same as breakpoint for a given human.

'cause it's only about a point one damping coefficient. But but the breakpoint pressure for these casings was again slightly higher on the order of five percent or so than for more traditional casings. So a couple of psi extra.

Elden (07:11)
Not

Hottie (07:12)
Thanks for indulging me and thanks for

Josh (07:13)
Yeah.

Hottie (07:13)
the new rubber. I love it.

Elden (07:16)
I'm gonna say also, guys, marginal gains is supported by Shimano. And I will honestly I let you back to the tire discussion in just a second. But first, I want to just tell one little story about me and Shimano and a little race called the Leadville 100. I just finished it for the 28th time and my consecutive time racing with I think second, third consecutive time racing with Shimano XTR Di2 Wireless.

Like last year, this year I did not bring a spare battery for my derailleur, which is maybe walking a tightrope without a net. But here is the thing. Since I started riding with Shimano Wireless Di2, both road and mountain a couple of years ago, I have needed to swap batteries mid-ride exactly zero times ever. meantime, I know for sure that every single year at Leadville, I see at least a couple of racers with a well-known wireless drivetrain.

riding in what I will describe as an unfortunate and unwanted gear with dead batteries. And it is never, ever Shimano. I got stuck behind someone this year with a that exact problem on a flat section of single track this year. He bottlenecked about 10 of us before he had to do the Yield of Shame. it's a big universe and I'm sure out there somewhere is someone who has a Shimano battery that has failed mid-ride. But I don't know man.

My experience is Shimano reliability is factorially better. that's the Shimano way. And you can learn more about Di2 and all of their very reliable components over at bike.shimano.com.

Hottie (08:57)
Alright Josh, I have obviously more questions on tires 'cause this is a fascination of mine. Next to hot waxing I think tires I know, here we go. Sorry sorry, Patty. So let's

Josh (08:59)
Honey's just throwing elbows at Fatty here, like out of the way. I'm

Elden (09:04)
Yeah I I am okay with this. I this is

Hottie (09:09)
talk about real quick about knobs. Like

You know, knobs on off road tires seems like to me at least, some kind of dark art. I don't know how companies come up with knob shapes, knob heights, knob spacing, and I guess the skeptic of me often thinks, I think they're just doing it for for the eye. Like, that looks good. It must perform good. So

Could you give us a little peek behind the curtain about how knobs are developed or how you arrive at at these patterns?

Josh (09:43)
Yeah, yeah. It it's so funny, I we before the show you were talking about talking to Gary Fisher next week and I I remember Tom Ritchey, you he'll wax poetic for two hours about carving every different pressure face in the knob and and then Gary Fisher was always like, I could write my name in the tread and it would work the same. It's like it really is a dark art and and people so disagree. I'll tell you the way we kind of approached it, so y

Part of our getting into tires all started, you know, at three years ago when we took Dylan Johnson to the wind tunnel and we had been doing all this Chung testing in the field. And it was really this my belief, which proved to be accurate, that you know, gravel tires sucked because the industry had approached the gravel tire as if it was like a road tire, then a touring tire. Then let's add knobs to our touring tire. Like that'll be a good gravel tire.

And so many of them are these thick, kind of thick treads that like a car tire have the the tread then like the pattern cut into them. And one of the things I'd always noticed is, you know, like because a bicycle tire's round, if you have tread cut into it like a car tire, when you flatten it, you can do this with your fingers, you flatten it like those tread grooves collapse. And so, you know.

We do all this work with Dylan. We find that the Race King three years ago was the fast faster than any gravel tire and it wasn't slower in the wind tunnels. Actually, pretty good in the wind tunnel. And so he starts racing racing the race kings, and we start telling this story of like, hey, gravel tires should be more like, you know, cross country tires made lighter, not, you know, touring tires made heavier. And and then I started thinking, like, well, how how do you think about what that tread looks like? And so we made a

box here, a photo box, and it's like a couple inch thick piece of glass on a aluminum extruded frame. And you can push the tire into the glass and then take pictures, right? You can see what it looks like. you know, my my vision was sort of like, you know, nobody ever asked the Earth what the tread should look like. Like why don't what what do we think the Earth sees? and so this was the closest thing we could come up with. I get it, glass is smooth and it's not whatever, but I can at least see

Sort of what the Earth is seeing. And then we made the box fancier and fancier, and so now you can like pneumatically load the tire into the glass at an angle to simulate cornering, things like that. And and what we really started to notice was, you know, we were right, those cut tread tires, they're damn near slick from the perspective of the earth. So like, you know, if you if you look at your tire and it has grooves in it and it looks like a car tire, the earth is probably seeing that tire as basically a slick tire.

and so that leaves you with like, well, we need thin casings with knobs. Well then you start to look at the knobs, and one of the things when you load the tire in a cornering, you realize like the outer surface of the knob ha has no load in it. It it's not capable of of you know putting any traction or or cornering force into the earth. But it is making the casing depress locally in a way that actually can take load off of the inner edge.

of the next tread block over. And so we started realizing like basically every tire in the market had some knob feature or another that was making adjacent knobs less effective. And and so, you know, we started I have a race car tire groover, which is basically just like a fancy hot knife that you can push and cut tires with. And so we just started cutting.

And it was actually I mean, we actually showed this to Continental a couple of years ago and they were not at all interested in talking to us. Although they did want to license our tire pressure calculator fr from us. But but but that was kind of the ex the extent of the discussion. And yeah, so we just started cutting away the things that were making the knobs less effective. and then looking at tires of like, this this corners really well when it's pushed aggressively, like this this

has a good buoyancy in mud, this, you know, feels good on loose over hard. and basically just kind of looking at it from the perspective of like, well, which of the knobs do we think are doing that? And then, you know, kind of making trying mixtures of similar ish knobs in the tires and see what the riders felt. And, you know, we had I think thirty-six or thirty-eight test riders involved in the process and you know, d Dylan Johnson and

Paige Onweller or a bun bunch of amazing, amazing athletes riding these. And, you know, at some point you just cut the molds and put them out there and see what the riders think. And the feedback kept getting better and better, and then we would start cutting and grooving our own prototypes and yeah, eventually you refine it to something that you're pretty happy with. Although you still look at, you know, it's like I always joke, you know, eventually you have to shoot the engineer 'cause there's you know, I still look at him be I wonder what'd happen if we

slim that one down or added an extra traction edge and but but yeah so our our theory I call it edges over blocks and it's the particularly in cornering, the inner facing edges are the things doing all the work and the rest of the block is is not doing anything other than providing stability to that inner face or that inner edge. and so if you look at all the SILCA tires, the outer edges of the blocks are either

angled or stair step down or just missing entirely. but if you put your fingers on the tire and you simulate like the load that the earth would feel when cornering, they actually feel quite aggressive even though they don't look it. like our RCG-1, it looks damn near slick. But when you r rub your fing we were just at the MADE Show in Portland showing this to people and I'm like, no, put your fingers like how the earth would feel and then try to break traction. They're like, shit, that's aggressive. Like yeah it it

really is aggressive. even though it's it it's very short. And yeah, I feedback so far has been exceptional. So we'll we'll take that as so far so good. Yeah, and I think we've already won half a dozen races and you know, we've had great success with with all three of the gravel tires at the highest level, so

Hottie (16:20)
All Fatty, thank you so much. The floor is yours.

Elden (16:23)
No,

Josh (16:22)
Yeah.

Elden (16:23)
I'm going to stay right on the same trajectory as you, Hottie. I've got questions that are maybe a little bit more on the back end side of tires. how have the sales gone so far? about as expected, better than

Josh (16:35)
Yeah.

Elden (16:36)
expected? haven't sold a single set pair? Ha what?

Josh (16:39)
Yeah, yeah. Haven't sold any, no.

god. Yeah, I mean we we expected this to be big. And I think it's, you know, typical, I feel like, of of SILCA. When we come into a category, it's just like, why would you go into that category? You know, tires are so full, there's everybody's you know, you can't do it better than the established players, whatever, whatever. It's like nobody ever quite believes us. And and this one was a little bit different and a lot of our distributors were like, Don't do it. Tires are terrible business.

But the dealers were I mean, we started showing four months ago these things to dealers and they were like, my god, like I we want and so the dealer sales ramped quickly and then that gave us the thought that the consumer sales would also ramp quickly. and even so we basically more than doubled our the s the stock that we wanted to have on hand when we launched, to what we had initially been planning. I mean, so a lot of tires and

Yeah, we launched on a Thursday and what, Thursday the twentieth. And by that Monday we were sold out and booking orders that probably wouldn't be shipping until first of October. So

Elden (17:54)
Wow.

Josh (17:54)
we're we're quickly yeah, we we over essentially we sold the first month and a half. Well, it it was two months of production in the build up and then we s we sold that and then we sold the next month and a half of production.

in four days. Now, the one of the limiting things there is our production is limited by the carbon beads. you know, carbon beads a 20-year-old technology Toray invented in Japan, actually for Hutchinson for the original tubeless tires. And it's just it's been used here and there, but nobody's ever commercialized it because it's more expensive. and our we're the first line where every tire is is 100% carbon bead.

And so we very quickly realized that we just completely overran Toray's ability to make the carbon beads because they'd never had to before. And so we're kind of in this delicate dance of their scaling to meet our need and then we're trying to manage expectations with our customers until we can get the production level up to a point that we can, you know, balance the the demand in the manufacturing.

Elden (19:02)
So have there been any surprises as you've started to sell these? Is there one that is like a a real runaway hit or one that maybe hasn't sold as well as some of the others?

Josh (19:14)
I mean RCG-1 I think is is the runaway hit and partly, you know, when by the time we launched, or I within a day, John Karrasch, who we've had on the show, he hit had been doing a lot of testing with us and it we very quickly I think the only tire faster than us is that two point four inch sand racing tire from Schwalbe, that that giant slick balloon sand thing, which is I mean, I love that tire, it's amazing. and I think we're

number two we're we're second place to it and I think even on type three gravel the only things there's a couple tires faster than us and they're all either two point four or like thirty two inch by two point four tires and I know he had just told me like I think the ther our thirty two inch RCG three is the fastest tire he's ever tested. Like period. which is crazy. Which is c is a little bit crazy. So but no I think that that testing

Being independent and out there that early really blew that tire up in an interesting way. And I think, you know, we we tackled that tire a bit differently than other people. It seemed like so many of those slickish centered gravel tires, like the so-called cat one tires, nobody ever puts like rowdy side knobs on And and, you know, we love that tire, but the more we looked at it, it's like, well.

It's a type one gravel tire, but like you're gonna you're gonna go out and get yourself in over your head. We all do it. Right right. And so we we put a pretty rowdy outer knob on that thing, which I think is just very different than the philosophy of a lot of other similar tires out there. And man, that really seems to have struck a nerve with people. Like, you know, hey, it's a it's a type one gravel tire that you can corner like a type

you know, in type three gravel you can corner like a type three tire, because of those knobs and I think that just fits with it certainly fits with the riding that I I've been doing, you know, and I I don't know about you guys, but, you know, it's like you ride like around here, we ride pavement to get to gravel. It it's type one mostly until it's not, right? But y you still ride the stuff that's n not. And and you know, when you're going in a straight line it's not that big of a deal but

When you need the cornering grip, you got it. And I think I think that really struck a nerve with people, in a way I expected it to, but it certainly I think landed even better than expectation.

Elden (21:52)
Yeah. Now I know that you just as a person don't really do anything without gaming it out. And you had to have seen that down the road this would impact SILCA's business in a pretty big way. I mean, just doing tires by itself seems like a completely different company than the rest of SILCA. I'm wondering, how are you planning to scale up SILCA or change SILCA? Or does or have you figured out that we don't even need to add a single new person?

with this entirely different and pretty major enhancement to your product line.

Josh (22:29)
I mean, you know, f for everybody else this just happened last week, but I mean it's a two and a half year process for us, right? Like

Elden (22:36)
Mm-hmm.

Josh (22:37)
this this started a long time a long time ago. And so, you know, we've been building the certainly the logistics and corporate infrastructure to manage it for two years. you know, yeah, I mean there's a lot of

You know, they're they're bigger than you think, right? I think it's you you can fit like two hundred on a pallet, like on an air freight pallet, and I think we can fit three hundred and twenty on an ocean freight pallet. And you know, you start to look at the yeah, the numbers and you're like, shit, we're gonna have to we're gonna have to, you know, stock a hundred pallets of these things. Like, I don't have space for that. And so so, you know, we've we've

Elden (23:13)
So if you had to build out

new new warehouse space, I mean is I mean literally additional garages full of stuff?

Josh (23:21)
Yeah, so short term, yes. And then, you know, we we now have five warehouses globally. three three PL warehouses, right? So that allows us to warehouse in other countries and so you know, not everything has to come to Indy anymore. which which is great. And then we're looking at we'll probably be opening a West Coast SILCA warehouse in the next call it four to six months.

Which will really allow us to again spread the stock, but then also satisfy our West Coast customers faster 'cause that's a you know, I'd say a relatively common thing we hear from like our dealer customers that you know, it's typically three or four days from Indy to say Southern California. if we had a warehouse in California, you probably get it next day.

And, you know, n nobody wants to pay the shipping 'cause those that's a pretty nonlinear, you know, this this box is you know, two tires is seventeen dollars to ship to the West Coast, and take four days. It's, you know

sixty three dollars to ship it overnight. I don't think anybody wants to do that, but people definitely want their stuff the next day. And certainly Amazon's built a world where everybody expects everything, you know, like, you can have it between three and five today. So so yeah, so I mean I think we're really looking to change and scale and grow the company in ways to meet the customer expectation, which, you know, it never relaxes, right? It only it only ever increases.

But yeah, so yeah, lot of things in play on the business side like that, but it in its most simple form, th I would say the the biggest issue around tires is just the sheer space.

Elden (25:10)
Yeah,

that makes sense. Okay, Hottie, I'm gonna give this back to you. I swear. Hottie's like,

Hottie (25:15)
Okay.

Elden (25:15)
I ask two questions, Fatty asks six. Sorry, man. But

Josh (25:18)
Yeah.

Hottie (25:21)
I know my place.

Elden (25:23)
I just wanna know what kind of reactions slash blowback have you been getting from existing tire brands?

Josh (25:35)
I mean, it was kinda awesome. Like, you know, we launched and and we we had the John Karrasch data in the launch and you know the the next morning, I mean, i the guy must have been up all night, but you know, Jan Heine at Rene Herse had published this really lengthy article basically, you know, saying that the the chung method testing that we did and that Yan that

John was doing was like, you know, not valid and and couldn't be trusted and, you know, all this stuff. And so, you know, that was kind of fun and and we we had really poked I think i i it the the tire the industry needs to get poked in the eye and and we poked the other tire manufacturers in the eye a little bit in that at every step of this process, the factory that we're working with, who who makes tires for like

i if you can think of if they're a big respected name, th this place has made tires for them. They do they're a smaller run shop, they allow for more customization and, you know, they make overflow for some people, they make the racing tires for some people. so i it's a it's a great shop. But

But you know, at every step of the way that it's like, you know, carbon bead, that it's so expensive, you know, it's you'll never get OE spec if you have carbon bead. Like, why not? Well, it adds three dollars to the cogs and you know, OE no OE will pay more than I mean, the the prices that we've been told OEs will pay for tires are absurd. And

yeah, we could we've got this rubber that's amazing, but nobody's ever spec'd it because it adds, you know, a dollar fifty to the tire and and you'll never get OE spec. And so we early on, I'm like, fuck OE spec, right? And and so we we had our the the number one tenant of the brand, we called it tech over spec. Right, right. And that was like like if there's a tech that we can put in the tire, we're gonna do it. And if it costs us OE OE spec, I don't care. You know, I I don't love OE business because it's it's a lot of units, but you know, they always want

b you know, we wanna pay you in a hundred and twenty days and we want you to own all the you know, we want you to deal with the factory and we want you know, it I I I'd much rather sell tires to like people, the people who are gonna ride the tires than to the companies. and yeah, it so I mean we we just you learn I I guess so much there and we just kept adding, you know, a dollar here and a dollar there and we'll

Once you're not using plus minus forty it's another reason, once you're not using plus minus forty five casing angles, you can't use the traditional puncture belts because the puncture belts are all woven fabric, zero ninety woven that you then cut at a forty five, so that you can lay it up and you get a plus minus forty five. But if you put that then in on top of something that's not forty five, you lose the the benefits, right? And so, you know, we had to create our own puncture belting fabrics and

you know, and God, that's you know, that's two plies that have to be laid down in the factory instead of one, so that adds a dollar. You know. And and so that's where, yeah, we're just like, well, we're just gonna give up on OE spec. Like we'll you know, we'll just assume it's never gonna happen. and I think I inadvertently, 'cause I've already had a conversations with a couple of the smaller high end OEs, but you know, in our launch we talked about it of like, well, we'll never get OE spec 'cause we're we're way too expensive.

And we don't care. You know, we'll we're just we're making tires for people. And yeah, a company I I won't name them but called and he's like, Man, he's like, You really poked us in the eye on that. I was like, Well fuck that guy. I'm gonna call him and show him that we can afford to buy your tires. I'm like so so there will be some out there, you know, that that comes back. But but yeah, it it the other tire companies are so I guess lost my place a little bit on that. But yeah, also the Monday after the launch,

We had told this whole story and said, you know, that one of the other problems with OE tires is that it creates this gray market pricing problem that the tires are made extra cheap or nobody wants to put the fancy stuff in them because they need to hit this price point to get OE spec. But then the OEs overbuy the tires.

And what they don't utilize gets sold into the gray market. And it doesn't take but you know one or two bad actors, and all of a sudden your price the price of a tire on Amazon is like half of retail, right? And and that's you know, as we were doing this, I mean it's you know, we'll just name them like Conti and Schwab both. I mean, I can buy Continental and Schwalbe tires cheaper on Amazon than I can buy them from QBP. And QBP is like the official distributor for North America of both of those brands. So

y it's pretty clear what's happening, right? Like th there's no bike shop, you know, paying sixty dollars for a tire and then selling it for forty-nine dollars on Amazon because that would just be ludicrous. So who can sell that tire for forty nine dollars on Amazon when it has a ninety nine dollar retail, well, the the person who paid, you know, twenty-five dollars for it or or whatever. well, who's the only person paying twenty-five? It's the OEMs.

And so we we kinda called this out and kinda I mean, I I hope I poked the industry in the eye a little bit of like, you guys are you could be making better tires than you're making, but you won't because you're so obsessed with this one type of customer that gives you all your volume, but then it's causing you and the bike shops these other problems. And you know, bike shops are bike shops hate the tire business because they can't make any money. Right. And

And so the Monday after the launch, we I got forwarded in an email that Continental had completely re they're restating their North American minimum advertised pricing policy and changing all and so it was just funny that it got sent to us by a bike shop that was like the guy said, we we think this is because of you. What do you think? I'm like,

Elden (31:26)
Ha ha.

Josh (31:27)
I think it might be because of us too. I don't know, but yeah, but I it

You know, y you have this industry that's just like forever shooting itself in the foot, in all sorts of businessy ways. And and I think a lot of it is just because companies get focused on the wrong customer. and and you hear this when you you talk to people, you know, I like here we we have a rule that, you know, like our only customer is the end user customer of the product. Right? 'Cause

You

know, when when your customer is the OEM brand or your customer is the assembly factory who's assembling the bikes, y your desire to meet customer expectation

can cause you to do things that have nothing to do with the end you you know, at the end of the day, the the the person riding the bicycle and spending their hard earned money on those parts, like that that's the only person that makes this all work. Right. So like I don't I don't give a damn what the what the bicycle brand wants or what the assembly factory wants. you know we definitely try to keep the independent bicycle dealer i in the equation, right? I mean they're

They're a customer, but also their customer is our customer. but yeah, as far as the r the rest of it goes, I I I think you can you can look at every product in the industry, tires being one of the worst, and say getting focused on the wrong customer has not been good for the ultimate end customer.

Elden (33:09)
That's a good place for us to move on to the next one.

Hottie (33:12)
Okay.

Elden (33:13)
just quick break. I think so I don't know if e either of you have taken a look at the this next one. It's basically a guy's like, I have an invention. am I going to ha run into UCI problems? And then he also is like, Josh, I would like you to be my business partner. and it's like I thought it was interesting just because it's like, you know, new guy, new product kind of follows on the tails of this.

But I also think that I don't know, it it it it goes pretty deep into the weeds and I'm wondering if we ought considering we recorded half an hour already, if we ought to

Hottie (33:48)
Mm. Okay.

Josh (33:49)
Mm.

Elden (33:49)
skip to Q Q four gels and cargo bibs, maybe just sort of move on to something a little bit lighter.

Josh (33:55)
Okay. Yeah, that makes sense.

Hottie (33:56)
Yeah, let's

do that. Okay.

Elden (33:57)
Okay, let's do that. That's you, Hottie.

Josh (33:59)
Yeah, just

'cause just his question is huge. Yeah, yeah.

Elden (34:02)
It is a huge question. And and I

Hottie (34:03)
Yeah, yeah.

Elden (34:04)
mean, I'm not saying that we ignore it forever, just maybe that we come back to it in another episode.

Hottie (34:10)
Okay, that seems like a good place to wrap up our tire. I'm sure there'll be more tire questions in the future on this show, Josh. Be ready.

Elden (34:15)
Yeah, think.

Hottie (34:16)
In fact, we we'd encourage

Josh (34:16)
Yeah, yeah.

Hottie (34:17)
the listeners to send them on in. Get them in here if you have direct questions about the PROTOCOL tires or about tires in general. I mean, obviously Josh has been through the ringer now on developing a tire, that he says he was forced to do. The industry forced him to do it. So there you go. Now we have tires from SILCA. Excellent. Okay, let's get to some listener questions. Alan T in North Carolina is loving his cargo bibs.

It has a race question he texted into the Marginal Gains Hotline. That's three one seven three seven three four five zero six, by the way. He says, I recently started loving my bibs with cargo pockets. At longer races I can hold more and I find myself a little more comfortable grabbing energy gels from those pockets. But here's my question. If I start a three hour race and keep six gels in my cargo beds, bibs, that is, at two ounces each, twelve ounces total, and my cadence is around.

eighty five revs per minute and I'm curling with every leg stroke an extra one hundred eighty three ounces or eleven thousand four hundred thirty seven pounds over the course of the race,

Josh (35:21)
Yeah.

Hottie (35:23)
would I be better off storing those in my jersey pockets?

Elden (35:28)
Yeah, I know we've talked about that cargo bibs are an aero disaster already. And we've briefly talked a little bit about the fact that you are lifting and putting down whatever you are carrying in your cargo po pockets. But I think that Alan did a great job of sort of talking about the numbers. Josh, does that hold up? I mean, are you over the course of a long race basically lifting several tons and and carrying it around?

Josh (35:55)
It

Yeah, so it's like reciprocating motion. So it it doesn't it doesn't quite like that, but th there is some of effect there. So I think yeah, yeah, there's a pure physics argument that, you know, it's kinda like the you know, the mass of your pedal, well, you know, the heavier it is, it's always being offset by the opposing one on the other side. in these sort of reciprocating things, it's like your thighs are basically, you know, going up and down

you know, at some angle from your hip. theoretically the weight in the one leg is helping to kind of offset the weight in the other leg, but so so the math doesn't work how he's got it. but because there are inefficiencies in the system and, you know, your one leg is probably stronger than the other, you know, you are getting out of the saddle and back down again. I mean, there are all these things that, yes, you're you're probably

you're probably doing yourself a a small disservice by having it in there. Now things like getting out of the saddle and down, th that weight is still there if it's in your your back pocket. so no, not quite as simple and as huge. What a hundred and eighty three thousand ounces or whatever he's got, yeah, eleven thousand pounds. it it's it it's nowhere near that order of magnitude and it really is is gonna be

a small order of magnitude and based more on the inefficiencies or left-right imbalance, you know, your one leg is probably doing a little bit of extra work because it's it it's making less, you know, power than the other leg. the the real the real one, yeah, you nailed it. It's it's the aerodynamics. I mean I every time we look at aero and and cargo bibs, it I'm reminded how just

Awful, awful it is. And and you know, I like to think of it just in terms of, you know, like you you spend a bunch of money for those aero wheels and then, you know, they're they can be a s you know, relatively decent sized benefit and you can give up from a from a poor aero wheel to a good aero wheel, you can give up that amount of watts by just putting things in your cargo bibs. you know, so we're talking on the order of like, you know.

five to seven ceramic OSPWs equivalent of watts. Right. So so yeah, if you if you've spent the money for any sort of marginal gains, I hate I hate to think that you're just completely undoing that and then some with those things. So yeah, rear rear pockets would definitely be preferred in that. And you know, but if you're yeah, I mean you're not super into

you know, speed's not your thing or or you're not racing or you're just out having fun and it's a comfortable place to put your gels, then go for it. But but yeah, if I mean you're doing any sort of timed event, y you know, r anything like that. Yeah, if you're truly racing, yeah, I w I would never put I would never put anything e even the empties, 'cause we've tested that too, the you know, tissues, empty gel wrappers, whatever, all of that stuff creates

disturbances that are just a lot bigger than any of us wish they were.

Hottie (39:21)
I don't like Faddy, don't you find it just feels weird? I mean, I know you have cargo bibs, I have them too, I have one pair, and I just find putting in anything in there I d maybe I'm just oversensitive to this type of thing, but it just feels weird for me to have stuff packed along kind of the side of my thighs there.

Elden (39:37)
you know, it's one of those things that you get used to. I will say

Hottie (39:39)
Yeah.

Elden (39:40)
that since I saw the the math breakdown of exactly how much a you know basically my gel empties, which is what I tended to put in my cargo pockets. I that's you know, it was a a fast, easy way to get rid of garbage is how I'd perceived it until I was like, wow, those are that's costing me real time when I do that. And

Josh (40:02)
Yeah, yeah.

Hottie (40:01)
Yeah.

Elden (40:03)
honestly, I still have

Cargo bibs because I have some Rapha cargo shorts that are really comfortable and I like a lot. I haven't put anything in them in a while. So yeah, I it it that's made a believer out of me. that said, it is sometimes more important to be comfortable and have something be convenient and fast than it is for you to be aero for a minute. So

Yes, when you are climbing or if you're doing a fast descent, you just finished eating and that is the fastest, easiest way for you to, you know, briefly stash your garbage or to grab a gel, go for it. Just bear in mind that when you have another opportunity to put it in a place that isn't basically a kite in the wind, maybe go ahead and move it around.

Josh (40:54)
Great point. Great point.

Elden (40:56)
Okay, next question. not everyone is riding with an ELETTRICO Micro in their MATTONE Ultimate. Although I am now, I am happy to say, deeply in love with the MATTONE Ultimate. I gotta say, Josh, I did not understand how awesome that the thread on that new BOA is. Holy cow. it's so easy. I and

Josh (41:17)
Isn't that cool? Yeah. I love that stuff. I love that.

Elden (41:21)
I mean it's smaller and yet I can put more in. that

That

is, by the way, not the subject of this question. Just a little side promo for SILCA, why not? this is what Jeff in Northern California texted in at 317-343-4506. He says, I'm wondering where to carry my GRAVELERO most aerodynamically. That's a that's a mini pump. Is it the same place with one bottle or two bottles? I have a D-shaped down and seat tubes and have the pump seat.

Behind the seat tube bottle cage. This seems like a bit of a penalty, possibly better when both bottles are in. The vertical distance exposed to air would seem smaller on the down tube, but perhaps the flow is less disturbed here, so maybe a pump here would result in higher drag. I used to strap the pump to the center line of the seat tube mounted cage, but this seems like a clouge. Basically, where do you put if you don't have

a if you don't have a a special place for your for your ELETTRICO.

Josh (42:28)
Yeah. Nah, yeah, yes.

Hottie (42:28)
Hm. Not in your cargo bibs. Do not put it in your cargo bibs.

I'm gonna jump the line up quickly, Josh, I'm gonna say put it in your back pocket, but go ahead. Yeah.

Josh (42:37)
Y yeah, b back pockets

probably the most aero place to put it. behind a D sa D shaped tube, like a seat post or seat tube would be super fast. we have looked at this down tube and seat tube bottle cage placement because the pump comes with a little mount for under the bottle

Elden (42:57)
Mm-hmm.

Josh (42:57)
cage, and it is faster on the seat tube bottle cage than it is on the down tube bottle cage.

But you know, as I'm thinking about it, we've only ever all the testing we've done there has been with bottles in the cages. so not a hundred percent sure he's if he's saying like, you know, you would run a down tube but not a seat tube cage, that may change the math on there. But I think certainly anymore all the work we do, I mean heck, even at the World Tour, everybody's got two two bottles anymore and certainly all the gravel racing,

being more or less self-supported, everybody we're doing all of our testing or half our testing with these jumbo ginormous bottles and things like that. So yeah, I would say strapping it to the center line, not so much a klouge, that's that that's a pretty good solution. but yeah, if you want it easily accessible and in the little thing, I would go seat tube mount.

seat tube bottle cage mount.

Hottie (44:01)
Yeah.

Have have you tested a frame pump, a full length the under the top tube frame pump?

Josh (44:06)
Yeah, and you know, frame frame pumps basically a a net zero.

Hottie (44:10)
Yeah.

Josh (44:11)
you know, running horizontal to the to the top tube. Even if the top tube has an angle to it, you know, they're typically round to semi round and so it's not it it's not worse than than the thing that it's that it's next to. so yeah, frame pumps are are actually a excellent, excellent solution. And I think they look cool. but

Hottie (44:34)
Yes, I

do.

Josh (44:34)
But certainly modern carbon bikes, pretty limited in which ones or how many of them can actually hold the thing.

Hottie (44:43)
Okay, Dave from Massachusetts just got a new bike. Congrats, Dave. Love the new bike day. But something feels off, according to him. Here's what he texted into the Marginal Gains Hotline. I just got a new bike, and though I can't quantify it, the amplitude of the high frequency vibrations feels higher than on my old bike. Is there a way to account for this when using the tire pressure calculator? Or better yet, should it be accounted for?

Josh (45:09)
Hmm, interesting question.

Elden (45:10)
Or is this a bad bite?

Josh (45:12)
Right, right. Yeah,

Hottie (45:12)
Ordered that bunk.

Josh (45:14)
I that's so much more to know or to ask. I I I would start with, is it is it the same tire? you know, tire is your first line of suspension to the ground. And oftentimes, you know, new bike the back to OEM tires. The OEM tires aren't always the best quality. and you know, higher

Tires with higher damping levels or higher hysteresis levels do result in higher amplitudes at high frequency vibration because they can't recover as quickly. You know, I think we've talked about that in the show before. You end up out in the kind of the far right region of the hysteresis graph, and the damping actually results in the tire

being much stiffer because it can't recover as quickly. So I would say, you know, i if it's the identical tire, then then it we can call it the bike, right? The frame. and certainly some frames are stiffer, harsher riding than others. you know, the tire and we do account for this on our tire pressure calculator that the higher damping, cheaper, less supple tires, you do account for them

with with a change in in pressure and you can calculate that right right on the site. So yeah, I would say as as for the should it be accounted for, I would say absolutely. I mean if if you don't like the way the bike rides, let's fix it. and tire pressure is certainly the easiest, quickest and freest way to change that.

Elden (46:47)
Mm-hmm.

Josh (46:49)
you know, and and quite frankly, you're i if it's a slower, higher hysteresis tire, you you will be making it faster by dropping that pressure

to get back into that, you know, more comfortable region because you're you know, you you likely are in that sort of you know, impedance part of the the rolling resistance curve, right? Again, out on the the right hand side of the graph. And so let's drop that pressure and get you back closer to that tire breakpoint pressure. past that if it's the same tire and it's the frame, then that also can and probably should be accounted for

with tire pressure or you could offset that by going and finding a more supple tire to just ensure that less of that harshness is making it into the frame where the frame is transmitting, say, a higher percentage of that harshness into your body.

Elden (47:48)
All right, a very interesting question. this one coming in by voicemail. Into the hotline once again, three one seven three four three four five zero six. I can do an interpretive reading if you guys would like.

Hottie (48:01)
okay. I'm sorry. This is yeah, voicemail. Okay.

Clothing I always forget long.

Josh (48:08)
Jerseys.

Hottie (48:08)
Mm.

Elden (48:14)
Basically, why

not long sleeves always?

Josh (48:21)
good question. So I think couple of things. The long sleeve th for road racing isn't necessarily always gonna be faster because the arm positions are so different. And so, you know, certainly the the fabric and the texture that you want, you know, say when you're more of like a straight straighter kind of arm elbow position riding in your drops is gonna be different than if you're in your kind of on the hoods position with say like a horizontal forearm.

You know, this we can easily account for these things in time trial suits because we we know basically exactly how your arms are gonna be positioned. but it is a much harder problem to solve for in road racing where your arms could be in any number of positions. the cooler thing is interesting and I think there's still definitely some debate out there over w whether

i it is cooler or not in in all conditions. And that's definitely where like the limit of my actually just on the phone this morning with with Allen Lim talking about a bunch of other stuff. He'd be a great one to pull in 'cause I he's probably looked at this 'cause he's done so much work on sweat, water evaporation, evaporative cooling, and all of those things. But I I know that there's definitely times where i it it's helpful, but there's also definitely times where

it it's harmful. And I think again with road racing, you probably don't have enough control over the weather and the sun and the, you know, everything else to be ensuring that you know it it it would probably be become like a day-to-day thing. Like, well it's it's eighty percent beneficial today, but maybe tomorrow it's only thirty percent beneficial depending on the the the weather condition. So yeah, I I would say that's

Pretty much why we're not seeing it in every race, but you are seeing it in in the time trials.

Hottie (50:20)
Awesome. Okay. let's end this episode where we began. But this time, yes, with tires.

Elden (50:23)
With tires.

Josh (50:25)
Ooh.

Hottie (50:27)
Because Hottie. this time with a question from a listener about tires for Cyclocross. This came into the Marginal Gains Hotline from Matt in Illinois. Is this a recorded one, Fatty? Or is this okay, so I read this one.

Elden (50:39)
This is not a recorded one. This is a text.

Hottie (50:41)
Okay, all right, cool.

Cross seems to be an arena where there are still gains to explore. Most performance tires, rolling resistance is optimized for straight line rolling tested on a drum. But when you take a corner, different pressures on the tire slow you down. Theoretically, could you design a tire that optimizes rolling resistance while cornering, like in races where there's more corners than straightaways, like cross and

formula fixed bracing and how would that tire be designed differently?

Josh (51:17)
Ooh, that that's a great question. Yeah, I i absolutely and it it's very hard to you can drum test a tire with some lateral kind of angular side loading in it. The the challenge we have is that so much of

'Cause this is a great question for road as well, right? Like why are we designing for cornering? The the challenge for CX and and mountain bike and you know gravel and everything else is really that it's much more of a traction related question than a rolling question in that moment, right? It's like would you would you rather be two percent more efficient in rolling or you know and hit the hit the ground or be able to stick the corner? and so I think that's where

You know, the the knobs on the tires are always going to slow you down compared to no knobs, but you need them. and then the different knob shapes are gonna you know, some are slower, some are faster, but they're really different shapes are helpful in different surfaces, right? So if it's

you know, like l that loamy soil that they have in in the northwest, right? Like that's very different than like sand or, you know, hard pack dirt or you know, in grass. I mean grass is actually a really hard one to optimize for 'cause it's it's pretty high hysteresis, it's pretty inefficient. but it also is relatively if you've ridden your road bike fast in the grass, it the traction sucks. And so you need something to kinda bite through the grass to give you

to to be able to transmit those lateral cornering loads into the earth. so yeah, I would say y you know, it you could optimize for this, but it would be much theoretically, you could optimize for it if you on fixed surfaces like asphalt. it would be very hard to optimize across different road surfaces or different gravel and dirt surfaces.

just because we we don't have the equipment yet. And I don't know if we'll ever have the equipment to do it, right? 'Cause you you think of just the lab test, you know, you have a big spinny drum and we can put a tire on there and we can simulate cornering forces, but then you can't cover that big spinny drum with something loose like sand or dirt, or mud or or loose soil because it flings off. And so yeah, it actually it's a very challenging problem to even think about how would you measure

before you even get to thinking about, you know, how how you would optimize. I I will say, th the best way to approach it is, you know, we we 'cause we see it over and over, that tires that have very low rolling resistance on a drum

generally always have very low rolling resistance on real world surfaces and you can see it in the data that they also typically corner faster because it's just it's a hysteresis question more so than anything else, you know. So the lower hysteresis casing is doing more to benefit you than say adding additional knobs or differently shaped knobs or changing the shape of a knob are doing to slow you to slow you back down. So yeah, I think as long as you're

Buying the best tires that you you can afford, regardless of what you know, cyclocross, gravel, whatever, you you're gonna also have higher cornering speeds. But yeah, I love the question and I love thinking through like how how w how could we build a rig to test that? 'Cause we we've talked about that a lot for the last two years. and they're really challenging questions to answer, even from a yeah, like how how the hell do we even start?

didn't get

Hottie (55:07)
Yeah.

Josh (55:07)
the measurements in the first place, you know.

Elden (55:11)
It we want to hear all your questions and here is how you can submit them. Text or call us at the Marginal Gains Hotline 317-343-4506. You can also comment on this or any episode at marginalgainspodcast.cc, which is where you're going to see links to all the platforms for listening to the show.

Josh (55:32)
We'll be back soon with more questions, answers, and lots of well, tire discussion and other things. But I swear we will get back to talking about wax very soon. Just for you, Hottie. and thank

Elden (55:47)
That was the first

mention of the word wax in this episode. I I think it's been like forty episodes.

Josh (55:50)
I had to I had to get it thrown in there. I we had

Hottie (55:51)
Yeah, it was.

Josh (55:53)
a whole episode and we never said the word wax, so I you know, all those people out there with their bingo cards,

Elden (55:56)
Got it in there.

Josh (55:59)
I I had to get it wax in there. Thanks again for listening to Marginal Gains.

Elden (56:09)
All right.

Hottie (56:10)
All right.