It seems like every few years the government explains away UFO sightings near a secret base in the desert known as Area 51 (hey, isn’t that the most winning rider number at the tour?!). Well no shortage of secret weapons come from the guys at Zipp Speed Weaponry, and rather than only getting you a fuzzy picture of a couple of obscure lights on the horizon, PEZ gets a look inside Zipp's Area 52 a day before Tyler's new BMC TT bike and Zipp 808 has everyone at the Tour saying “What the hell was that”!
Zipp count on the “average customer” to pay the bills, (like every manufacturer in the bike industry…). But they don’t design things for sale, they design things for performance (sales take care of themselves for the most part). That’s a nice change of pace in an industry that seems to create for the sake of “wow factor” more often than not.
The latest “tool” to roll through is the new 808... It Looks like a wheel to me too, but it’s not hard (even at low resolution) to see that the surface is a little special…
Speaking with the head, um… “head” at Zipp, Josh Poertner (design and engineering guru), I got the feeling that the best part of his job is getting to make things that he and the rest of the Zipp crew will be happy to hand to people looking for an edge. They would way rather make it perform well than look cool, then again one most of the time leads to the other.
Says Poertner; "It’s what we do, we look at every millimeter of every part we make, and keep refining and creating until we have something that goes above and beyond what has been done previously, by us or anybody else. We probably hurt ourselves a little in the cash end, as we might spend hundreds of design and testing hours refining details which the average customer may never notice. In the end though, we want to be happy with what we have made, and we want the customer to know that purchasing a Zipp product means buying a product that is the result of years of research, development, refinement, and creativity. The label isn’t what makes a Zipp product a Zipp product, it’s what’s underneath that counts."
True enough, but Josh can be happy that pretty much everyone reading this at PEZ look hard at what the pro’s are winning on, and as long as they're providing an advantage to the athletes they support in the pro peloton, the rest of us will toss out the cash for the same tools.
SEE THEM LITTLE BITTY HOLES?
The surface gets a lunar landscape in the form of the same dimples you see on the Zipp disc wheels that Tyler will run (which also look almost exactly like the dimpled disk that another American Tour guy might run…). The craters help hold airflow onto the surface of the wheel longer, keeping it from slipping off and generating turbulence.
The less you disturb the air as you penetrate it, pass through it and when you leave, the less work you have to do to get through it…
But there’s far more to this wheel than the carbo-craters.
While the dimples on the 808 are something that any duffer can see, and Zipp have had a bulge in other wheel models for quite a while, something that most folks miss on the 808 wheels is revealed when looking at the cross section of the 808.
SOME AERO-SCIENCE FOR Y'ALL
With the design of the 808, Zipp started with the tire and worked backwards, in order to control the airflow with the rim itself. Numerous low speed aerodynamic studies had shown that the ideal section thickness should occur at 55-60% of the section length, this is in contrast with the traditional teardrop shape in which the peak thickness generally occurs at 25-30% of section length. ‘We have done a bit of research and quite a bit of testing at Texas A&M and found that by pushing the thickest section of the rim further down the rim section, we improved every time. In fact, we found that most standard airfoils are faster backwards at these low speeds as the max thickness occurs at 70% instead of 30%. This is rather counterintuitive at first, but when you look at the Reynolds number involved, it all makes sense,’ said Poertner. With the 808, Zipp left the thickness right at 60% of rim depth (including 21mm tire), and found that the aerodynamics improvements were drastic. With these calculations made, the total depth of the rim was calculated out to be 81mm which was what the team ultimately decided on in the final design of the 808.
Zipp has two patents on rim shapes that are designed to handle airflow better than this standard deep section wheel.
The first is for a rim with parallel brake surfaces and a rim body ballooning out beyond the brake surfaces that handles airflow very well,
and the other for a rim which would be oval in cross section and blending the tire into the rim curvature (this is co-owned by Steve Hed).
All Zipp rims except the new 202 utilize the primary Zipp patent, but neither Zipp nor Hed had ever built rims which very closely mimicked the second patent. The problem was that this shape results in canted brake surfaces, something which both companies realized would be very difficult to do if the shape were utilized in its ideal embodiment. Hence, Zipp developed the regenerative airfoil concept you see now, where the airflow that becomes separated off of the tire edge is re-integrated into the outside flow by the bulged rim section.
The regenerative airfoil concept gives the engineers a lot of room to play with the rim shapes, and over the past 4 years, Zipp has re-engineered their rim profiles 3 times, each time finding further improvements.
‘People generally don’t realize that we have put a slightly improved rim shape into the market each of the last 3 years, but each time we have found both aerodynamic and structural improvements without adding weight to the product.’ said Zipp president Andy Ording.
They know that in the real world, wind doesn’t come at you head on all the time.
In fact it comes at you at an angle most of the time, and it is at the most common angles (from 0 to 20 degrees) that the 808 (and 404) really shines…
The 808 is not just better than the standard TT Tri-spoke, it actually out performs a solid disk in some cases, but does so in a package that is extremely well suited to the front end...
Another advantage is a massive weight savings for the 808. PEZ found it tips the scales at an incredible 585 grams! That cuts almost a pound out of a Tri spoke TT wheel, which must be great getting out of the start house, and then the 808 stays faster...
AND THE RUBBER MEETS THE ROAD...
The 808 was set in motion in an effort to get something in Tyler’s hands that would give him an honest advantage (@17 seconds in 40k). The guys at Zipp also know that there is a certain psychological boost that Athletes often cull from feeling like they have an edge. I have to wonder, when listening to how passionate everyone at Zipp are about what they do, if they don't get just as big a charge out of doing things for the pros as the pros get from using them.
Best of luck to Tyler and Zipp as they roll toward the start on the new 808! See you at the Prologue!
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