AFFORDABLE SPEED
PARCOURS HAS FORGED A REPUTATION FOR MOLDING CARBON WHEELS, BASED ON RESEARCH AND TESTING, WITHOUT BREAKING THE BANK. WE HIT THE ROAD TO UNCOVER HOW THEY DO IT…
THIS is one of my three laptops… and here’s a bag of sensors… and see those oscillations? That is what I am interested in.” Steve Faulkner, sport scientist and senior lecturer in science and technology at Nottingham Trent University (NTU), has just popped into Parcours’ chipboarddecorated office-cum-warehouse and he’s in his element. He’s not the only one. Dov Tate, owner of the UK wheel brand, is hypnotised by Faulkner’s data-rich spell. “Ultimately, we’re both engineers,” smiles Tate, “albeit Steve’s a worldclass one. He’s helped us deliver what we feel will be a gamechanger for us and triathletes…”
LAUNCHING IN KONA
We’re in Puttenham, near Guildford, to find out more about Parcours, one of the UK’s most progressive and fastest-growing wheel brands. The timing’s perfect as not only is Midlandsbased Faulkner in the area visiting his father-inlaw, but Tate, plus marketing guru Amy Marks, once of Canyon and M&C Saatchi, are in particularly exuberant fettle ahead of the company’s latest wheel launch.
“We’re heading to Kona to launch an update of our Chrono wheelset, plus 83mm Chrono Max and disc wheel,” reveals Tate. “As for Steve, he’s worked with us for a few years as we have a technical partnership with NTU. We were outdoor testing earlier in the week, using some of the sensors Steve’s brought with him. It’s all good.” One of those sensors delivered from Steve’s carrier bag is an ultrasonic model that calculates wind speed and direction that attaches to a bike via 3D-printed mounts fitted to the end of the thru-axle. It’s a device that gives a clue to what’s arguably Parcours’ biggest venture yet. You see, when Tate says “update” of the Chronos, it’s more like an overhaul. Marks, who divides her time between Parcours and road racing for Team Brother UK – LDN, hands me the front wheel. I rotate the wheel and observe. I do the same with the rear wheel. Even this short-sighted writer can observe the difference.
“FROM SPEAKING TO ATHLETES AND OUR OWN TESTING, WE’RE BEGINNING TO SEE THAT IN MANY CONDITIONS, A REAR DISC IS MORE STABLE THAN A DEEP-RIMMED WHEEL”
“You’ll notice that the front wheel is a little more U-shaped and blunter, whereas the rear’s a sharper, V-shaped profile,” Tate explains. “That’s the end result of a great deal of CFD (computational fluid dynamics) work and testing with those sensors, which highlighted the difference in yaw angles at the front wheel compared to the rear wheel. At the front you’re looking at up to 7° whereas you can see from this chart that the frequency peak’s different at the rear, so you’re more likely to see lower yaw angles.”
Parcours love a chart. And they love a study. They pride themselves on producing white papers to document the rationale behind their wheelsets, which sit within their website. In this case it shows that this disparity in wheel profiles results in a more stable, better-handling set-up that Tate says is around 10-15% greater than the previous incarnation of the Chronos. This is helped by reducing the rim depth slightly from 77mm to 68.8mm at the front and from 86mm to 75.7mm at the rear, which, Tate continues, is actually marginally faster than before.
Tate concedes a couple of other wheel manufacturers are similar in “design language” but don’t explicitly say why there are different rim profiles. Parcours, he affirms, are upfront and want to educate the end user. They’re doing so at their famed impressive value, with the new Chrono wheelset costing £1,199. The Chrono Max is £600, while the team’s new disc wheel will set you back £1,049. Again, more affordable than the high-end, £3,000-plus competition from the likes of Enve and Lightweight.
‘But discs are banned at several races including Ironman Hawaii,’ you bemoan. ‘Will I get enough use?’ You will if Tate and Faulkner have their way. The team are heading over to Kona to not only parade their new goods but also for testing purposes. “From speaking to athletes and our own testing, we’re beginning to see that in many conditions and set-ups, a rear disc is actually more stable and comfortable than a deep-rimmed wheel,” Tate reveals.
When he says more stable, we’re actually talking less twitchy at the front, even in what the team call those ‘Oh shit moments’, like a sidewind gusting through a gap in hedgerow. “Three of our sponsored athletes – Kyle Smith, Laura Siddall and Fenella Langridge – raced on discs at the St. George Ironman World Championships in May, using 30mm-wide tyres pumped to just 50psi and all finished in the top-15. They said how stable and comfortable they were, both on the bike and then hitting the run.”
Tate has a glint in his eye at the thought of presenting the case for discs to be removed from Kona’s banned list, as well as not being adverse to the reaction of the click-bait-friendly story.
LONDON LIFE
Parcours has come a long way in a short time. They launched at the London Triathlon in 2016, which was four years after Tate began turning around the excess of London life. “I studied engineering at Oxford University and did what many engineers did back then, which was to go and work in the city. Engineering and Oxford was a good recruiting ground as we’re good at mathematics and, in general, pretty driven. Mind you, it was an inauspicious start as the day I started working for an investment bank [15 September 2008] was the day the Lehman Brothers went under. I declined a job from them, actually, and thank god I did.
“I’d put on a little weight, was working long hours and generally not leading a healthy lifestyle when 2012 came around. The Olympic Games, Wiggo-mania and all that. I bought a bike, enjoyed riding and then started triathlon the following year. My equipment grew – as it does for all of us – and I came to the realisation at a race at Dorney, where I’d punctured, that the majority of upgraded, deep-rim wheels were well over £2,000. That was more than my bike was worth. I dug a little deeper and found cheaper carbon wheels but only if you went through eBay. However, these nameless wheels had no data behind them, no rigour. I thought, there’s got to be a middle ground here. But there wasn’t. That’s when I thought, how hard can it be? So I set out to create a wheelset with me as the first customer.”
The thought coincided with a real desire to avoid spending his 30s in investment banking. Soon, Tate had prototypes made up from open molds and was flying over to the United States for testing in the famous A2 Wind Tunnel in North Carolina. He was pleased with the results; he also came away with many questions still to answer. What’s the best lay-up of carbon weave? How long should the cure time be? What resin will be used? What bearings to use? What spokes? That’s when Tate went on a two-week fact-finding mission to China, visiting factories before settling on one in Shenzhen. After much back and forth between Tate – owner, designer and engineer – and the Far East experts, Parcours was born, launching three wheelsets in London: the Grimpeur, Passista and Chrono. “We had a stand there, did a bit of publicity, but it was kind of very much bootstrap PR. It was actually the following February, when 220 awarded the Chrono wheelset the editor’s choice award, that things started to take off.” The power we wield!
RAPID PROGRESS
Back then, Tate was working out of his flat in Clapham and storing stock in a Big Yellow Storage unit. But the foundations had been laid. “Over the next couple of years, our wheelsets really progressed. The analogy that I’ve used a few times is, it became a bit like the process of buying a suit. You start off by buying an off-the-peg number from M&S, which was pre-manufactured for a certain fit. It’s kind of the open mold of shopping. Then, as I was able to invest in growth from sales, we were able to buy an off-the-peg suit but take it to a tailor and be measured up. In other words, we can start to tailor the rim designs, so introducing tubeless compatibility, tweaking hub specs, changing the carbon layering… taking the existing design but making it better. Then, by 2018 as a company we were about the bespoke suit. All our intellectual property, our designs, our lay-ups, it was all unique to us.”
Parcours continue to use the same manufacturing outfit in Shenzhen, working with a team who, though not employed by the UK outfit, are dedicated to them, including a project engineer who Parcours will work with using CFD software SimScale. But now the set-up is specific to them. It’s an operation that’s smoothed out over the years but raises the admittedly lazy question of, why not manufacture as well as design in the UK?
“Ultimately, it’s down to quality and quantity,” Tate says. “UK carbon engineering is great but it’s more set up for prototyping, which works for Formula One when you’re making three units but not so great if you’re looking to produce 3,000 units. China’s wheel-builders are also phenomenal. We have a great wheel-builder here but only one – they have many.”
“UK CARBON ENGINEERING IS GREAT BUT IT’S MORE SET UP FOR PROTOTYPING WHEN YOU’RE MAKING THREE UNITS RATHER THAN 3,000”
Parcours’ sole UK wheel-builder, Skye Sandison, is a bit of a success story in her own right, earning a permanent skilled role after joining the team through the government’s Kickstart Scheme. Tate’s only other UK colleague is Marks in marketing, meaning a domestic outfit of just three. That could grow soon, however, after receiving a £100,000 expansion loan from the Enterprise M3 Funding Escalator. That accelerated the development and launch of the new wheels as cashflow’s always the main problem of a small business like Parcours and will help further growth.
QUICK FACTS
01| CHRONO WHEELSET
• Price: £1,199
• Depth: 68.6mm front, 75.7mm rear
• Max rim width: 32mm front, 30.5mm rear
• Internal rim width: 22.5mm
• Aero optimised for a 28mm tyre
• 15% more stable than previous generation wheelset, while maintaining aero performance
02| CHRONO MAX FRONT WHEEL
• Price: £600
• Depth: 83.6mm depth
• Max rim width: 32mm
• Internal rim width: 22.5mm internal
• Aero optimised for a 28mm tyre
• Maintains handling stability from previous generation wheel but saves 4W when fitted with a 28mm tyre
03| DISC WHEEL
• Price: £1,049 (£1,599 with Chrono front; £1,649 with Chrono Max front)
• Internal rim width: 22.5mm
• First rear disc wheel to be truly optimised for running with a wider tyre
• Agnostic of tyre width up to 30mm – no aero penalty
• Disc-brake specific design from day one
• Approx 120g lighter than previous generation
And that’s despite the issues faced due to Covid, which means Tate hasn’t been able to physically visit China for over two years because of strict quarantine rules. The impact of Covid’s also perversely meant a swifter turnaround. “Before Covid struck, shipping would cost you between $15 and $18 per wheelset. It’d take 40 to 50 days to arrive in the UK. Now, that can easily reach $80 per wheelset because of container costs. That’s why we now ship by air. It’s only around $20 more and is much quicker. In fact, the airfreight service we use is quite an interesting one as we use a broker who’ll sort last-minute availability. It’ll be a certain price if it can be sorted in seven days, a different price at 14 days… it’s a really useful system.”
And it’s a system that’s helping many of the world’s triathletes and Ironman athletes ride ever faster and, say Parcours, handle better whatever the conditions. Tate says the split of roadies and triathletes is around 50/50, albeit this skewed to the former during Covid as triathlon’s such an event-driven sport. Tate predicts 2023 will be a bumper year for triathlon with an increasing amount of people more confident that events will take place. As for Parcours’ plans beyond 2023, they float around the idea of taking things to the global next level by sponsoring a World Tour cycling team, albeit that’d need bigger budgets and a bigger team to “maximise the collaboration”. For now, they’re happy to disrupt the industry with their affordable, high-tech carbon wheels and disrupt the masters of Kona with their disc-wheel game-changing data.
JARGON BUSTER
CFD
Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is the use of applied mathematics, physics and computational software to visualise how a gas or liquid flows past and affects objects.
YAW ANGLES
The direction the wind moves in relation to the direction the wheel moves.