Eurobike report: Wild, wild new road wheels from Zipp, Hed, Reynolds and more
- By Zack Vestal
- Published Sep. 3, 2010
- Updated Feb. 8, 2011 at 8:50 PM UTC
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
Zipp's Josh Poertner shows off a chart graphing his new 808 wheel's drag in grams against yaw angle. Zipp's testing shows over 100 grams and 15 watts saved at 30mph with the new wheel.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
Zipp engineers use computational fluid dynamics to model and illustrate how different rim profiles behave in the wind.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
Zipp is moving toward fatter, blunt rim shapes across the range. It started with the 404 and now moves to the 808.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
Zipp's 808 tubular has come to define the deep carbon aero wheel catagory.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
A first for Zipp, the 808 now comes as a carbon clincher with exactly the same rim profile and aerodynamics as the tubular version.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
The Firecrest rim profile from Zipp features a very wide, blunt spoke bed.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
The Firecrest name actually evolved from Zipp's internal code names for different shapes that were tested. All the code names were types of birds, and Firecrest won.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
Zipp's new 808 stands in sharp (blunt?) contrast to other aero wheels on the market that favor sharp spoke beds.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
Reynolds happens to be one with some sharply bladed rim shapes.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
The RZR 46 wheel gets a new option for 2011, with a rim that's been beefed up for stiffness and to pass the UCI crash test standard.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
Kevlar strand wraps through the RZR rim to add stiffness and help retain rim fragments in the case of a crash.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
The Reynolds RZR 92.2 is one that sports an extremely sharp inner edge.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
On the RZR rear wheels, a third, mid-hub flange helps transmit pedaling torque.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
Reynolds's Element disc is used by their AG2R professional team riders.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
Reynolds's famous wheel engineer Paul Lew designed the RZR 92.2 with a NACA airfoil shape to smooth airflow off the tire.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
Much of Reynolds range gets updated for 2011.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
Now all the Reynolds rims feature the inner wall Swirl Lip Generator which is meant to improve aerodynamics.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
For 2011, Reynolds introduces two fully tubeless carbon rims.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
There's a carbon rim for XC use, and a beefier one for all mountain and trail duty.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
Interestingly, Reynolds's carbon off road rims don't feature spoke eyelets, which are typically employed to help distribute spoke tension loads.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
Reynolds uses their own straight-pull hubs for the mountain wheel lineup.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
Paul Lew stands with his wheels at Eurobike.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
The carbon tubeless all mountain rim has a deeper profile than its XC counterpart.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
Riders can choose UST tubeless tires or standard tires to go with Reynolds carbon rims.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
As far as we know, you still can't get Corima wheels in the USA, but they've got some crazy designs.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
The tubular carbon spokes on Corima's light wheels look a lot like Mavic's R-Sys spokes.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
By contrast to Mavic's R-Sys, Corima's spokes are molded right to the hub shell.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
Also in the Corima booth, we spied a carbon tubular mountain bike wheelset.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
Centerlock brake rotor splines on Corima's carbon tubie wheelset.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
These wild wheels don't look like they should work, but obviously they're ready to roll.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
Angling the drive side spokes allows for torque transmission between hub and rim.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
As with Lightweight carbon wheels, the Corima carbon spokes anchor at the rim with no means for truing the wheel.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
This shallow tubular climbing wheel from Corima is quite light.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
The Corima carbon wheels come in shallow and a deep rim variants.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
On the way from Hed is a wheel called the Stinger 5.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
Hed's Stinger 5 is built to be a strong classics and cyclocross wheelset.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
Hed's signature bulbous rim shape persists with the new Stinger 5.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
A blunt inner rim wall should make the Stinger 5 quite fast if past experience with other Stinger wheels is any guide.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
The Stinger 5 tire bed is built specifically for 25mm and wider tires.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
The Ardennes SL has been a top seller for Hed.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
On top of the wheel revisions, Hed is now offering their Corsair aerobar without built in brake levers.
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2010 Eurobike Report: New road wheels
The absence of built in brake levers on the Corsair E aero cockpit allows the use of Di2 or other personal choice in brake levers.
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Eurobike Report: New road wheels
Hed aero cockpits also offer a new shape to the extensions for 2011.
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Eurobike Report: New road wheels
Long favored by the teams of Lance Armstrong, Hed offers a new signature 3-spoke wheel with deeper rim cross section for 2011.
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Eurobike Report: New road wheels
Hed's original H3 remains, but the new H3D above it has a deeper 80 mm rim profile.
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Eurobike Report: New road wheels
Regardless of sponsorships, Hed has supported some of the best cyclists in the world.
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Eurobike Report: New road wheels
Stan's NoTubes wheels might be the most popular mountain bike wheels among elite riders in Europe.
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Eurobike Report: New road wheels
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Eurobike Report: New road wheels
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Eurobike Report: New road wheels
Typical application of the yellow tape is by hand, from individual rolls.
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Eurobike Report: New road wheels
NoTubes is working with Holland Mechanics to create a machine to apply air sealing yellow rim tape to wheels.
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Eurobike Report: New road wheels
Stan's rim taping machine is still undergoing refinements, but eventually it will speed his wheelbuilding and rim taping operation significantly.
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Eurobike Report: New road wheels
If you want to convert your own wheels to tubeless, you should start with Stan's yellow tape.
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Eurobike Report: New road wheels
Lightweight's new 8-spoke front wheel looks wild.
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Eurobike Report: New road wheels
Possibly the lightest disc wheel available, the new 780 gram wheel has been in testing for months.
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Eurobike Report: New road wheels
The major structural design of the new disc mimicks Lightweights original.
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Eurobike Report: New road wheels
With just 8 spokes, Lightweight means for the new VR 8 to be more aero than a typical Obermeyer model.
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Eurobike Report: New road wheels
Lightweight's basic hub shape and lacing style carry forward from the Standard series.
The 808 comes in tubular or clincher. The clincher has the exact same profile as the tubular.
Lots of news on the wheel front here in Germany at the Eurobike trade show. Naturally there are plenty of carbon rims stamped from the same mold, but a few jump out with original engineering and design.
Zipp 808
Zipp’s position at the top of the leaderboard in the study of wheel aerodynamics is hard to dispute. Armed with some impressive drag data and computational fluid dynamics illustrations, head of engineering Josh Poertner proudly introduced Zipp’s new 808 rims.
The new rim features the company’s Firecrest profile, a rim shape that debuted with the 404 clincher earlier this season. It’s got wide, parallel walls and a fat, blunt inner rim wall (spoke bed). Zipp’s earlier designs placed a toroidal bulge behind the tire to reduce turbulence at the wheel’s leading edge, but Firecrest shifts the widest point of the rim inward towards the hub and tapers only slightly towards the tire. The blunt shape helps keep airflow attached to the wheel and laminar as it comes off the sidewalls and exits the wheel’s path. The new 808 also sports a wide tire bed that Zipp carefully shaped to match the profile of 23c tubular tires for better glue adhesion. And, the edges of the tire bed are now reinforced and profiled in the same way as the 303 rims, for better impact and pinch flat resistance.
In addition to the tubular 808, there’s a carbon clincher version. The rim shape and aerodynamics are exactly the same as the tubulars. Despite their upgraded aerodynamics, weights for Firecrest-based wheels remain quite light: 1278g for the 404 Tubular, 1557g for the 404 Carbon Clincher, 1519g for the 808 Tubular, and 1759g for the 808 Carbon Clincher. Suggested retail prices are $2300 for the 404 Tubular, $2700 for the 404 Carbon Clincher, $2500 for the 808 Tubular, and $2950 for the 808 Carbon Clincher. Clincher wheels with aluminum braking surfaces are still available for both the 404 (1658g, $2,300) and 808 (1912g, $2,500).
Lightweight
With a factory literally just a few kilometers from Messe Friedrichshafen where Eurobike convenes annually, local builder Lightweight’s display in the show hall is popular. The company showed off a new disc wheel with a claimed weight of just 780 grams. It’s built with tensioned carbon strands similar to their original, internally spoked disc.
With just eight spokes, Lightweight means for the new VR 8 to be more aero than a typical Obermeyer model.
Also new from the Germany company is a radical eight-spoke front wheel. Lightweight built it as an aerodynamic complement to the disc. Claimed weight is 650 grams with significant improvements to airflow and no reduction in stiffness.
We’ll have more details from Lightweight in the weeks to come.
Hed
Not to be outdone by Zipp’s 303, Hed introduces the Stinger 5. It’s built with a rim shape similar to the 46mm deep Stinger 4, but the tire bed and aerodynamics are engineered specifically for 25mm and larger tires. The Stinger 5 is Hed’s version of a cyclocross and classics-style wheelset. The rims are built for impact resistance and strength.
Hed also widens the aluminum tubular tire bed of the Ardennes series of wheels and brings carbon fiber front hubs to most of the entire wheel line. Finally, the rear wheels move to 2-cross lacing for added stiffness.
Reynolds
Aerodynamics and composites wizard Paul Lew showed off some of his designs in the Reynolds booth. Lew takes an approach opposite of that employed by Hed and Zipp, relying on extremely sharp edges and NACA aero profiles in his rims and spokes.
New in the line this year is the addition of a small lip or “trip” at the spoke bed on Reynolds’s entire road rim line. This “Swirl Lip Generator” debuted on the ultralight, sub-900 gram RZR wheelset last year and is meant to deliberately trick airflow into moving more smoothly across the rim. Also new is a different carbon material and high temperature resin in the brake track. Combined with new pads, Lew claims a 100-degree Fahrenheit reduction in brake pad and track surface temperature.
Finally, Lew’s moving forward with an updated version of the original RZR wheel. It turned heads last year as the lightest production wheelset ever built, but didn’t meet the needs of certain riders. So Lew and Reynolds added about 100 grams to the wheelset to improve stiffness and to pass the UCI’s crash-impact test. The new version of the RZR is still extremely light at just around 1000 grams for the pair, but should be quite a bit stiffer than the original.
Check the photo gallery for more details on these and additional wheel developments.
FILED UNDER: Bikes and Tech / Eurobike / Gallery TAGS: Eurobike / Gallery / Hed / Reynolds / tech-news / wheels
Zack Vestal
Zack joined VeloNews in 2009, bringing 15 years of industry experience to the Tech Editor position. Most recently manager and mechanic for the Trek-VW mountain bike team (2004-08), he has an unused geology degree from Whitman College (and a well-worn Ph.D. from the school of hard knocks). Vestal covers the latest in cycling gear online, and brings in-depth perspective to the magazine.
