ichobi wrote: ↑Thu Mar 14, 2019 3:12 am
I dont know if you can answer this Josh, but is it possible to tell us which wheel brands have put the most effort in r&d? Some brands like to talk about their development a lot say Zipp and Enve, some not so much like Campagnolo. All of them makes great wheels.
ichobi, this is really hard to say at this point.. I know that when I left Zipp we estimated we spent roughly 3x what anybody else was spending on R&D, but a lot of that came from everything in that factory being done from scratch, so there was a wind tunnel team, layup team, tooling team, CFD team, materials experts.. we were also probably 40% of the global carbon wheel market at that point, so by the very nature of it we were the biggest spenders. So many companies/brands don't actually make anything themselves, so the R&D might only consist of wind tunnel testing or CFD or soemthing like that..
I will say that I thikn Zipp, ENVE, Specialized and Swisside are widely believed to do more wind tunnel than anybody else. When I left Zipp we had contracts in place with SanDiego to do 100 hours per year and were in process of building a custom balance at the ARC wind tunnel which is about a kilometer from Zipp headquarters, this is the sister tunnel to the Mercedes tunnel in England that ENVE/SimonSmart use but I'm not sure if that has them doing less or more testing.
I currently think that Swisside are doing the best combination of aero and education out there.. we used to pride ourselves on the education side of tunnel work and I just don't see that happening now in any of the other companies.
The other half of the money comes on the manufacturing side and really only Zipp, ENVE, Corima, and Shimano are actually making their own rims that I'm aware of.
Your mention of Campagnolo is an interseting one, we used to make stuff for them and they are just SOOOO conservative. Their wheels are very nicely made, but they are by design one generation behind what the cutting edge companies are doing as they are just to risk averse, Shimano is quite similar.
T