This article was produced in association with Parcours
“If you’re the kind of rider who gets a buzz from riding on trails or tracks, doing a transcontinental or a three-day camping expedition in Scotland, you’re probably not going to be delving into every single watt-saving from a deep-section wheelset, but it’s nice to know that that level of science has been applied to what you’re riding,” says Dov Tate.
When Oxford engineering graduate Tate started Parcours in 2016, delving into every single saving of watts was his mission. He’d spotted a gap in the market for aerodynamic wheels that were backed up by real science, but were still affordable. He had the qualifications and the experience – he’d completed a scholarship with British Aerospace and a course module with BMW and after graduating had initially gone into the City – to deliver them. He left investment banking to launch Parcours, and a study into real-world aerodynamics with Nottingham Trent University’s sports engineering department followed. The project placed marine anemometers at different points on the bike to measure wind angles, and it gave Parcours a dataset that resulted in the Strade, a wheelset with different front and rear rim profiles which was hailed as a gamechanger when it was launched in 2020.
In 2024 Tate is sensing that the game is changing yet again, and once more he wants Parcours to be ahead of it. He’s arrived for our interview on a mud-caked titanium Terra gravel bike – with Parcours Alta wheels of course – and tells me with a smile that he’s discovered some exciting new bridleways. The message is clear. Parcours has just moved into a bigger warehouse and office space and Tate is enjoying exploring. And enjoying cycling. And he wants Parcours to be more about enjoying cycling too. Yes, saving watts still matters but, as he says, not at the expense of enjoyment.
“Up until now the brand has always been what I wanted it to be – focused around accessible aerodynamics,” he explains. “But we’ve realised it’s a lot more than pure science, performance and engineering. What we’re trying to deliver to people is that feeling you get when you’re putting something fast on your bike. That grin. Not everybody in the world is trying to race. Yes, there are people who really want and need that technical side, but there are many more people who are emotionally driven. Rather than being output orientated, saying, ‘Here’s the performance,’ we wanted to be more input, saying, ‘Here’s the technology and experience that delivers that performance... or just that feeling.’ It challenged me to ask myself what I wanted the business to be, what our story really is. And it’s about that sensation of speed, enjoyment, fun and that big grin.”
I’ve arrived for the interview at the Dabbling Duck in Shere on an S-Works Aethos, lent to me by Specialized as a test mule for the new Sram Red groupset. It weighs 6.2kg, it’s smooth, clean and really the polar opposite of Tate’s Terra. But they’re both insanely fun to ride. Like that? I ask him. An incredibly high-performance bike that’s not for racing?
“It’s not a rational thing, it’s a feeling,” he agrees. “As cyclists we’re not doing it rationally, because if we were, we’d be racing, not sitting here eating cake in a café in the sun. We obviously don’t want to take our eye off the fact that we can deliver a performance product, but you don’t need to be a racer to get something from it. And that’s the story we want to be telling.”
In order to tell the story, Parcours’ product range is now split into two or “arguably three” elements, he explains. “Aerodynamics Lab is all the aero research, performance, road, time trial, triathlon and that’s where we’re looking at the science of speed. The feeling we’re delivering here comes from going really fast, whether it’s in a race, setting a PB or that rumbling noise from a disc wheel.”
Parcours has achieved considerable success with its #thinkwider aero wheels: its Chrono and Disc wheels have been ridden to the highest level in triathlon, including a race win in the T100 series and leading off the bike at the Ironman World Championships. Parcours was also the first to offer a carbon disc wheel with the Classified Powershift hub, which it launched in June 2023 – almost a year before a Princeton disc with the Classified hub was used by Ineos riders at the Giro.
Tate continues: “Then we’ve got Frontier Workshop, which is about adventure and targeted more towards the gravel world. What we’re now seeing in gravel is a really defined spectrum. Two years ago it was, ‘Here’s a gravel bike.’ Now you’ve got a gravel race bike and a gravel adventure bike and we need products for both ends. We’ve got the Alta for the adventure side, very much about endurance, longevity, build quality, comfort... The performance element is what we’re working on next. We’re looking at aerodynamics in gravel, catering for riders chasing a Fastest Known Time and we’ve launched our new FKT wheel this month.”
Tate is keen to talk about the FKT's unique R&D process. The wheel brand collaborated with tyre brand Panaracer, working specifically with the GravelKing and its recently updated X1 tread pattern. All the CFD [computational fluid dynamics] modelling was being done around this particular pattern. But why? “The reason why aero gravel is difficult is because gravel tyres have tread,” says Tate. “We developed our Strade, Ronde and Chrono around 28-30mm slick road tyres. The performance aerodynamically is near enough the same whichever tyre you put on as long as they’re the same width. With gravel you’ve got different tread patterns that throw off hugely different airflows. So you can’t optimise for every gravel tyre out there, but you can say it works best with this size, but tread pattern-wise this one works the best. Obviously if you put on a slick tyre or gravel tyre with less tread, that will be faster, but there’s a huge trade-off there in terms of traction and puncture protection. Overall, if you’re going to race Unbound, for example, this is going to be the optimal choice. In gravel there’s way more talk about tyres than there is on the road. So we’ve flipped the story from, ‘How do you minimise the damage to aerodynamics caused by a gravel tyre?’ to actually optimising around it.”
Did the debate around hookless, rim widths and tyre widths have an impact on the FKT's development? “Everything conforms to ETRTO [European Tyre and Rim Technical Organisation – the industry standard] because even with gravel tyres there’s so much confusion out there. We are working with a hookless design because the pressure you use with a 40mm gravel tyre is so low that there’s minimal risk of blow off. The performance benefit of hookless for gravel is impact resistance. With a hooked rim you’ve got stress risers in the corners so it’s more likely to crack there. Secondly, we use a slightly different resin in the rim edge that’s a bit softer and more impact resistant. You can’t do that with a hook because it has to retain rigidity. In terms of internal rim width we’re going wider than we have previously, but still allowing for a decent range of tyre options.”
Parcours athletes Maddy Nutt and Joe Laverick have already ridden prototype versions of the FKT to wins and top-10s at the UCI World Series, plus a podium at the Migration Gravel Race.
The FKT went to the A2 wind tunnel in North Carolina, where Parcours tests all its wheels so that data can be accurately compared, “except this time we were benchmarking and not testing. All the testing was done in CFD. Over the years we’ve built enough of a correlation between CFD and wind tunnel testing that with the Chrono in 2022 we had just one prototype in the wind tunnel and it behaved exactly as we expected within the margin of error for the test. With the FKT it was slightly different because we’re including tyre tread, so one of the reasons we got 3D printed rims in the office first was ffor testing also so we could mount tyres onto the rims, 3D scan them and then you’ve got a real-world model of how the tyre sits on the rim as opposed to an approximation in CAD [computer aided design].”
After Aerodynamics Lab and Frontier Workshop, the third category is Parcours’ legacy product, in other words, rimbrake wheels. “Frankly we’re not putting a huge amount of R&D time into it, but there’s still a portion of the market that wants it so that’s why we’ll always have it. We’ve got the old models in the line because the newer ones are too wide for a rim-brake caliper. There are quite a few rim-brake TT bikes out there and still on the market too. People are still buying new Giant Trinities with rim brakes [the last TT bike in the WorldTour to switch to discs] but we’re focusing everything on disc brakes. Part of the reason is that there are 30-plus years of carbon technology on rim brakes and five years’ worth on disc brakes and we’re still learning, and I think that’s where we’re going to get so many advancements. And that’s where the frames are changing. You’ve got way more tyre clearance, caliper integrations, changes in rotor technology and so on, and that’s where the juice is going to be in terms of finding performance.”
What might finding performance involve in the future? For the next generation of wheels, Tate foresees sustainability as becoming a factor to consider alongside performance or even as an integral part of it. “Cycling has a real dilemma now. Great, we’re all riding bikes and not burning fossil fuels, but what it takes to get your product here is the dirty secret. Carbon manufacturing is not clean, logistics and shipping are not that clean yet. At the moment we have our Greenspark initiative and we’re saying that for every watt you save we’re going to rescue bottles from the ocean. It’s a nice initiative but ultimately that doesn’t undo the damage of the manufacturing process. Or even the materials or circularity of materials. The carbon fibre that we’re using right now, if it breaks, that’s it. It’s very difficult to recycle. So we’re saying, how can we do better?”
Parcours is starting to look into thermoplastics. Most of the carbon used in cycling is thermoset: once the epoxy resin is cured, it’s irreversibly set, whereas thermoplastic is literally more plastic so that it can be reheated – effectively melted – and reused. “But the issue at the moment is that there’s a weight penalty,” says Tate. “And even if a product is as sustainable as it can be, a lot of people are still focused on weight. And cost.” Thermoplastic rims are already here: Chris King offers wheelsets made from FusionFiber, the trademarked name for the thermoplastic material made by CSS Composites in Utah, which owns much of the current intellectual property on plastics in cycling. CSS’s own wheel brand, Forge+Bond, also has its own range of FusionFiber wheels. The material is claimed to offer better vibration damping than the epoxies and resins used in traditional carbon fibre.
“However, the issue with thermoplastics is that although you can melt down and reuse the resin, if you want to reuse the carbon itself you have to cut the fibres and that removes the tensile strength,” says Tate. “So even though the carbon can be recycled it’s used in things like tyre levers and building blocks because it only has compressive strength and not tensile strength. Rims and frames need both. It would be nice if we get to a point where we can say the bike and wheels you’re riding are not virgin fibre, in the same way that paper is recycled and reused to make more paper, not something else.”
Tate believes that it will be possible to achieve better circularity for carbon-fibre bicycle wheels and reveals that Parcours is working with a company that takes the broken fibres of recy- cled carbon and re-aligns them so that material’s tensile strength is restored, making it suitable for rims and frames rather than tyre levers and building blocks. Then, combined with thermoplastic resin, old carbon wheels could come back as new carbon wheels. There’s still a long way to go, with many unknowns and significant challenges. Will there be the same weight penalty, for example?
“We don’t know. If they can’t make it as strong as virgin fibre we would need to increase the amount of material. But being completely honest, we may not initially produce a rim 100 per cent from this material. It might be 10 or 20 per cent, but that’s 10-20 per cent more than we had yesterday. Similar to clothing with a percentage of recycled fibres or airlines with sustainable fuel. It’s not perfect, but if we were only striving for perfection we’d never achieve anything. You do what you can when you can and then that’s a step in the right direction. We don’t want to do anything without there being a benefit to the rider, but it might be that that benefit is reduced environmental impact. If the consumer demands it then things have to change, but at the same time if there are performance compromises people need to be aware of it. You might go back to the old adage about strong, light, cheap – pick two. Now it could be sustainable, performance, cheap – pick two. To make sustainability sustainable you have to reduce the compromise on performance and/or price, ideally both.”
Tate continues: “We’re trying to make sure we’re front and centre with these companies in terms of partnerships. We’re good partners because we’re agile. We can turn things around incredibly quickly, we can bring things to market or public quickly without having to go through huge levels of bureaucracy, sign-off etc. If we decide we want to do it, we’ll do it.”
That’s where Parcours is going. What about where it is at the moment? Tate admits that his company was fortunate to avoid the overstocking issues post-Covid that have caused the ruinous discounting we’ve seen in the industry. Despite rivals discounting and customers asking Parcours to match prices, he’s held steady and, as the move to bigger premises demonstrates, is still growing. Parcours wheels are mostly regarded as an aftermarket upgrade – would original equipment manufacturer (OEM) be the next step, to become the original wheels sold with a complete bike by a company that doesn’t have its own wheel brand?
“We do OEM with custom and smaller framebuilders: Terra is a really good partnership, we’ve also got Handsling and they’re growing really fast. We’re having a lot of conversations for the coming months and years. The stuff we’ve done with Classified is very interesting – we’ve got a partnership that’s quite deep now and we’re seeing it coming to fruition. The fact we can offer Parcours x Classified can open some OEM doors for us and we can open some aftermarket doors for them. Nobody else does a disc wheel with a Classified hub yet.
“The market is going the other way. More and more people are selling direct. Is a new sales channel or retailer going to unlock a sale that we wouldn’t otherwise get? Can we reach more people through a partner than directly? We want to find people that fit with our strategy, so I don’t think you’ll ever see our wheels piled high on the shelves of Halfords or anything like that. For us, it’s not just shifting boxes, it’s about doing it with the right people in the right way. We put a lot of work into our brand and values and we want everything and everybody we work with to align with that. I want to make sure that however a customer gets their Parcours wheels, they get the same level of support and insight that they would if they bought it from us direct. It’s not just buying a product but it’s buying into that system, network and almost databank that we’ve got. That’s where we can stand out, rather than saying, ‘Here’s your product, off you go, have a nice time.’ That makes growing more challenging, but it makes it more sustainable.”
The sun is shining on us as we finish our coffee and cake. In case Parcours’ new focus on the enjoyment behind and beyond racing isn’t clear enough, Tate’s choice of Biscoff and banana cake underlines it. It’s a sumptuously sweet slab of sugary sponge with the name ‘Lotus’ inscribed on the biscuit on top. Parcours’ success indicates that perhaps that you can have your cake and eat it.
