153. Aero mutinies and secret shorts with Castelli's Steve Smith

0:00I reckon a while ago the bike computer market looked all sewn up. There were two big players, end of. Kind of like how once upon a time group sets meant either Shimano or Campagnolo. So there's a wonderful synergy in the fact SRAM busted open the group set market back in 2006 and now SRAM's computer arm, Hammerhead, is blowing the doors off in the same way with the Hammerhead Karoo. My favourite thing about the Karoo is how much it's like a smartphone. So the touchscreen is really crisp and punchy, so data and mapping, which is way more like a phone's mapping than a classic bike GPS, by the way.

0:34Those things are super clear. But unlike a phone, battery life is a huge 35 hours with GPS on and your ride recording, plus it's also way smaller. It's up there with the smallest head units, given what it does, and it does loads, from predicting gradients in real time, to making routes on the fly, to running apps like Spotify, and it will even tell you how fast you're going. There's a whole lot more that we'll get into in other episodes, but for anyone who just needs things now, now, now, head over to cyclist.co.uk and search Hammerhead Crew 3 to read our in-depth review and find out why we gave it our cyclist recommended badge of honour.

1:10Then head to hammerhead.io and use the promo code cyclist to get a free heart rate monitor with every purchase of a crew. Just make sure we put everything in the basket first before applying that promo code cyclist promo code hammerhead.io is where you can find all the gear

1:33welcome back to the cyclist magazine podcast i'm your host james spender um and joining me why is that so funny will you sound so tired of it god i'm your host so i try to do it with some more pizazz welcome back to the cyclist magazine podcast i am your host james spender and joining me down a wire, wire, wire, is Will Strixon. Will Strixon, ladies and gentlemen. And the crowd goes mild. Mild. Anyway, how are you, Will Strixon, ladies and gentlemen? I'm good, James Bender, gentlemen and ladies. What have you been doing? I haven't seen you for a good long while. I don't know, really. I've been out and about, been in and out, been up and down, you know, some things, been out in sunshine.

2:15We've had a little bit of sun. We have had a little bit of sun in the UK. That's been really nice. And that's cold and bleak again, which I like but this week it's warming up again yeah still got loads of you know four degrees and there was a frost the other day but anyway we won't get hung up on the weather we will talk about cycling at some point but before that I'd like to ask you how you felt about the rugby because I know that you've always got a rugby shirt behind you I don't care about rugby but I feel like I should talk to you about it because you do yeah I mean it's as an England fan it's not necessarily if anyone knows what happened in Six Nations I'm sure they'll know that England and weren't the best team.

2:51Far from it. But that's fine. You have ups and downs. I support many teams that never win and haven't won for most of my life. So it's not big, no big deal. The sport's enjoyable to watch. And then I turn that back on you, James. You're a Manchester United fan. Well, I'm a lapsed United. I'm a lapsed Catholic, lapsed United fan. Once upon a time, my bedroom was covered in, like literally covered. There was no wallpaper. And pulled out pictures from magazines. Do you remember magazines? We're a magazine, aren't we? Cyclist magazine. So check Cyclic magazine out. Yeah, really good one, I believe.

3:23And we're just about to drop our next issue, which has got some great stuff in it, including me riding the Maratona Dolomiti, which is a big sportive in the Dolomites in Italy. It's quite hard. Anyway, you can read all about that. I make it sound more exciting than I did just then. But I used to cut pictures out of magazines. Those were pictures of people at Ryan Giggs, Latterley, Skolls, Skolls, Skolls, Skolls, Paul Skolls, David Beckham. Paul Skolls. anyway i'm getting off the point what are you trying to tell me united i don't know i don't even know what united are doing these days where are we we still in that still in division one yeah still in division one cycling james let's bring it back we are a cycling podcast i'm going to talk about bikes quickly before i introduce our guest and i'm going to do this with my camera because it pivots and i'm not sure if you can see it will that's just the door oh no i've just knocked off a speaker behind me.

4:15But there is a bike. It's a Bastion. It's a Bastion, that's right. I don't know if any of you listeners, dear listener, have you heard of Bastion? Not Bastion Schweinsteiger, Bastion the bike brand. Not Bastion Schweinsteiger, all roads lead to football. No, Bastion the bike brand, Australian bike brand. It's a very nice bike. It's got 3D printed lugs and it's got carbon fibre tubes. The 3D printed lugs are made of titanium. That's exciting, isn't it? I like the lug. Lug is a good one. Good for ears, good for things that join pipes. Anyway, can you guess how much that bike costs? What currency?

4:55UK pounds. I'm going to say 20k. Why did you say that? Takes the wind out of my sails, doesn't it? I feel like I probably shouldn't have said I live in Bristol and I've got this bike. But it's just mad. It's a beautiful bike, right? And thank you very much to the guys at Bastion for loaning it to us for a review. It's going to go in the magazine. I'm going to ride it. I've wanted to ride a Bastion for ages. There's£20 ,748. That was a great guess. That's a great guess. But you're£748 off, which is a lot. That's mad, isn't it? Isn't that just, it just blows my mind. I don't know how I'm going to kind of deal with talking about that in a bike review, because it's a real elephant in the room, price like that.

5:42I'm sure it's going to be a phenomenal bike but even in this job where you become jaded and the introductions to your own podcast sound like you couldn't really give a toss that still stands out that's mind blowing and it's kind of fantastic and just blows my mind it's mad, I just can't get over it I just can't get over it Will, as you can tell I can't get over it Is that including paying for the import duty for it to be flown over to the UK from Australia? uh i couldn't tell you all i can tell you is if you wanted to buy one off the website the freight the chassis which is the frame fork headset ceramic speed sl2 headset with no bearings and it's just a slightly polymer which is kind of cool uh and a one-piece bar also 3d printed titanium carbon is 13 000 euros i think it could be 13 000 pounds it's definitely 13 $15 ,000.

6:37And it's a lot, right? It's a lot of money. And you haven't even got wheels in that equation. So there we go. That's the modern world. But I also went to Wales and even going to a very basic pub, a burger and chips was$18.50. So you make of that what you will. £20 ,000. Is that your pint in London these days? Very good. Very good. Very good. Although same place I went to in Wales, a pint was$540 for a really nice parallel. I don't know if you're saying that's good or bad. I'm saying that's pretty good. I mean, once upon a time, obviously, when you could kind of get... I remember back in the day when you'd go out on the lash with your mates and you'd take four pints to be lashed and you could get four pints for under a tenner.

7:22Yeah, job done. Job done. Anyway, should we do this job? Yeah. Okay, so our guest today is Steve Smith. Not a cricket player. Is there a cricket player called Steve Smith? another sport I don't follow. Not a big fan of cricket, to be honest. Yeah. Steve Smith. Steve Smith. Now, Steve Smith is currently head of Sportful, Castelli, Carpos, which is an outdoor brand, at a bigger company called Manufatura Valcissimo. I think you say that. Great delivery. Thank you very much. Which is a very old Italian manufacturing company of clothing. Once upon a time, they were making things like football shorts for AC Milan in the 1890s.

8:04Can you imagine? 1890s. They made the first Lycra shorts. This is with, I think, with Castelli. And they also made the first colored Lycra shorts because before everything was black and they released a purple pair of shorts, which Steve talks about. But Steve is basically in charge of Castelli and Sportfall, two of the biggest brands in cycling kit. And Steve has overseen over the years developments of early aerokit, as in aerodynamics kit, which kind of seems commonplace and you might be thinking yeah and what but once upon a time to take a rider out of their training schedule and put them in a wind tunnel in various jerseys to try and work out which is the fastest jersey and then convince the riders themselves they should wear jersey x instead of jersey y because they'll be this much faster that was a massive deal it wasn't happening steve was one of those people that helped pioneer that and i mean that genuinely it was driven by companies such as Castelli, which now everything's about aero.

9:02It's standard that kit fits well and makes you more slippery if you buy a more expensive aero kit. Steve also had the Gabba as one of his kind of pet projects, which again, I think most people will, Gabba became a kind of, what's the word, a proper noun, is it? A bit like Hoover, where it just became the word to not be the model of the Castelli garment itself, but just to describe any sort of jersey that was kind of half jersey, half jacket, sort of a little bit like a very thin wetsuit, not technically waterproof, really good in the wet nonetheless because it kept you warm and was stretchy and therefore aero.

9:42And it changed the game and suddenly every brand had a Gabba type item in the lineup. And so it goes. So every brand still does. So those are but two of Steve's big contributions to cycling. and I also touch upon some questions that I have around bike kit like does Gore-Tex ever wear out so for this and more stay tuned to the psychosmagnosis I'll say that bit again No just keep it as that I think Should we just keep it as that? Yeah it was kind of a bit of a Steve Carell Anchorman moment Do you know what we'll just keep it in because we're just rolling with this and I've got other places I need to be so I'm not going to redo that I hope everybody has managed to stick with us because this is genuinely a really fun interview with Steve.

10:28So please welcome to the show, Steve Smith from Castelli and Sportfall.

10:38But yeah, Steve, where are you? Where are you? Because that doesn't look like your average office, even though I'm assuming you're at work. Exactly. I'm at work. Headquarters in Fonzazzo, Italy. We're the first valley into the Dolomites. and probably the best place in the world to do cycling clothing because we have hot summers and cold winters, and we have as much rain as London, and we can get up to 1 ,800 meters just out our back door. Nice. I've got this kind of vision of any high-end, well, any Italian cycling firm doing mostly riding and then coming back and having an espresso and talking about the riding, and somehow at some point some shoes or some jerseys or some helmets or some bikes pop out?

11:22We just ride and hang out with the pros is all we do. Yeah, cool, nice. So how did you get to that? I mean, so a kind of potted history time. I hate to ask that question, how did you get to where you were? But I find it really fascinating. I know lots of listeners do too. But if you had to do a kind of one-minute CV, a brief history of Steve Smith, how would it start and where would it get up to? Yeah, so I was the kid that was always on the bike and started racing as 15. I wasn't that good at it, actually, but I liked to race. I didn't like to train, and so I was always into my equipment. And I went through university, went to work at Nike, as you do growing up in Oregon.

12:01And after 10 years of that, the wife and I, we thought it'd be fun to take a little career break and go have a forward experience, international experience. So I started looking around. I got in contact here with the Cremonese family, the owners of Manifatura Valchismon, Algezumon is the name of the parent company, which you know as the owners of Sportful brand. When I first moved over, we just had Sportful. This was back in 2000. And then we bought the Castelli brand in 2004. And then, yeah, 25 years later, here we are. So that kind of addresses a question that I often get asked, like, what's the connection between Sportful and Castelli?

12:40But then the kind of secondary connection question is, isn't Sportful like an affordable Castelli? Because if it's the same parent company and we see crossover fabrics, but there is a definite change in difference in price. Yeah, so Sportfoto was the homegrown brand with the manufacturer of Alchizamon based here in the Dolomites. And back in 2003, 2004, Castelli fell in a bit of hard times and we actually bought the brand out of bankruptcy. And so there's just a lot of synergies on the back end. in our pattern making group, we have actually seven people. We've got 15 people in our prototype sample room here.

13:24We actually bring all of the fabrics into the office here before we send them out for CMT production. And of course, warehousing, administration, all that. There's a lot of synergies kind of as services for the two brands, but the brand direction, design, development, sales, marketing, all completely separate between the two brands. And it's true that Sportful kind of focuses, it comes down to a little bit lower price points than Castelli does. Castelli reaches up to higher price points. Sportful just by nature of the way it even started, it started with Dr. Giordano Cremonese making a cross-country ski suit for himself to go participate in a cross-country ski race back in 1972.

14:06So it really started in these mountains of us making stuff for us to go out and play. whereas you know Castelli much more of a race performance brand so almost you could think of Castelli's starting point is almost the finish line whereas Sportful competes and then goes out and has fun of the whole adventure and exploration. Sometimes it takes you to a very similar type of product but even the difference of where it starts from can lend a different flavor to it. And then we have the benefit of just the accumulated know-how within this building. I always find that fascinating the idea that I mean it's really obvious but cycling kit didn't always exist you know you look back at like really old pictures and you have just got guys wearing plus fours you know people wearing kind of repurposed work wear woolen jumpers maybe something that you might find someone driving a motor car in or riding a horse and then eventually you have people making stuff out of wool but you look at like what we wear now and it seems so standard.

15:07But once upon a time, you had to have that vision, which kind of blows my mind that because Castelli, I think I'm right in saying, was the first brand to make a Lycra cycling short back in the 70s. 78. Yeah. But actually, it's funny that you say that because the Castelli got its start back in 1876 as a tailor shop in the center of Milan and did some really nice high-end tailoring and got into cycling because their customers were coming and asking them to make cycling clothes uh so costante giardengo who won the the first year d 'italia and alfredo binda who was like four-time world champion back in the 1910s were both got their cycling kit made by back then the the tailor shop was called vittorio johnny but yeah had to invent this stuff right there at the beginning and then going forward in uh right before world war ii vittorio johnny the taylor shop passed into the uh hands of the of the castelli family and it was uh mauricio castelli so the son of the first castelli owner of vittorio johnny that started using the castelli name on the products but he was uh just a innovator really into design performance raised uh on the track as a kid and yeah just started the castelli brand and a whole more of the innovation thing because it came more from craftsmanship and then maurito brought in the the innovation back in the in the 70s and then yeah a number of firsts so there was the lycra short and then we did the first sublimation printing uh in cycling back in 1982 so up until then it was wool jerseys with flocks or or embroidery on it and uh first synthetic uh winter wear and yeah number of first up until now.

16:55And that was quite a kind of moment for the traditionalists, wasn't it, when the first colored shorts rocked up on the line? Yeah. They were all black before. Was it purple, weirdly? Was that the first color you did? No, it was turquoise. Okay. It was the Hunved Botechia team that they had. Their kit was kind of an off-white with this turquoise. And Maurizio made these full turquoise shorts, but the lycra we had back then you know now our standard lycra is around 220 240 grams so around an eight ounce lycra back then it was more like six ounces so you're around 180 grams was thinner a bit more transparent and your your chamois didn't quite cover up as much in the front it wasn't padded right it was just literally a piece of of deer skin just providing some abrasion resistance so um actually talked to the guy the first guy uh he was a sales rep for us for a long time he was the first guy to wear lycra shorts in a colored lycra shorts and he talks about that day at the giro where uh it was a you know hot hot day at the giro at the start early afternoon and they rocked down to the start line with their wool tights on and just peeled them off at the start line it was a bit embarrassing to walk around in yeah do you as as a as an american coming to work for you know i think it's i hope it's a nice word to say because i think sometimes people feel it's a bit reductive a heritage company also a performance company but a heritage company is it incumbent upon you to sort of learn all these stories because i'm thinking they're a bit different uh kind of a company like nike it's so steeped in history as are so many italian brands and the passage is so tenuous often a bit like as you were talking i was thinking of columbus that make tubing and they didn't they start antonio columbus dad was basically making furniture yeah and they went hey we do steel tubes they could be in a bike and somewhere someone went hey we like bikes in the company so let's do that so have you kind of got this like dossier of like these are the stories steve needs to know if he's going to come and work for the italians um no and and uh i find these stories absolutely fascinating i've had the privilege of talking to a lot of people that either did them or you know or there and seeing it maybe not firsthand but secondhand but we're around at the time and just i mean it's incredible what what's happened in our sport and we when we look at cycling clothing today we kind of forget all it's taken to get to where we are today but having bought the brand out of bankruptcy we also lost a lot of the all the archives along the way so it's it's a matter of having to go out and find some of these people and discover hear their stories and so yes not just there here's the archives go take a look at it and uh actually so with castelli being founded back in 1876 uh this year is our 150 year anniversary so we've got some stuff coming up later in the year to celebrate 150 years which is kind of crazy are you going to do a commemorative ac milan cycling kit or uve cycling kit because didn't didn't castelli also make those at the sort of end of the 1930s were uh juventus and ac milan yeah and then they were they were doing the italian national team football strips up until the 1970 World Cup.

20:06So there's a few of those around, but when they come up on eBay, they go at pretty high prices. So let's kind of talk about your tenure and what you've seen develop and change. So if you started at the company in 2000, Cyking would have looked very different with now 26 years later. What would you say, so first off, is the difference in the way that professionals, how they dress and what they expect from their kit, how's that sort of changed? Yeah, so in cycling, clothing, it's been an arms race just like on the bike's side. Maybe even more so because we've probably given more gains on the clothing than the bikes.

20:45If you go back to 2000, the jerseys, they fit large. And when it rained, they pulled out the clear plastic rain capes for it, right? It's funny we laugh now, but it's surprising how primitive it was. Yeah, I mean, that's not that long ago. And then I think the first big kind of change came along when we invented the Aero jersey. The story behind that is I was at a 2005 interbike show, and that's when Zip brought out their 404 with dimples on it. And they were claiming it saved like four watts. What if we put dimples on a jersey? And then I came back and got with our designers and developers and was like, let's make an aero jersey.

21:27And I was like, okay, how do you do that? And nobody knows how to make an aero jersey because no one had ever made one before. We were trying to even figure out where to start. Our designer knew an engineer at Ferrari. We still have the email. He writes back and says, you're just wasting your time because anything under 200 kilometers an hour aerodynamics doesn't matter. Both. Yeah, we started out with, you know, this is going to be tough. And then, but even in that first jersey, I mean, we made it so it was fitting out closer. We put in panels with the dimpled fabric into it and went to the wind tunnel.

22:02And we're actually shocked to see, because we didn't even really know how to test at that time, right? But one of the tests we did was comparing, we wanted to test the jersey both in an upright position with your hands on the tops versus hands on the bottoms and hands on the hoods. and what we saw is that the aero jersey, your hands on the tops, was actually faster than a standard jersey at the time with your hands on the hoods. And that's when we sat up and said, wait a minute, there's a lot more here than we even imagined. Yeah, so that was 2006. So I guess, yeah, this is our 20th anniversary of going to the wind tunnel and trying to make it faster.

22:38So that's the one side of where we've seen a lot of gains. And then the other side is just protecting for cold and wet conditions has just been completely upended. Yeah. So, I mean, what was the reaction to riders that you were sponsoring at the time? So, who did you have? Sudol. Sudol, yeah. Sonny Duvall. Sorry, Sonny Duvall. Actually pretty funny because there was one guy in that team, David Miller, who immediately, like, this is it. Another rider who will remain unnamed here, but basically got together with other riders and created the the the mutiny group right i was like we're not gonna wear this cut you know it said it looked like underwear um you're gonna be too wet when you come down the hill we're gonna get sick and so uh a number of the riders yeah didn't didn't really have a lot of pickup in in sonia dual and so that was 2007 that we delivered the first ones and then got halfway 2008 then ricardo rico the tour de france kind of imploded the whole team and uh then we started out with uh cervello test team the next year and there because it was an industry team and everybody understood our dynamics oh and we forget this uh cervello test team was a pro conti team that started from nothing with you know a mixed group of riders but by may of that year they're the number one ranked team in cycling ahead of all the world pro tour teams but you know the only team with aero bikes aero wheels aero clothing i mean they probably had that 25 30 watt advantage every time they lined up and that's that's where it just exploded you know because you have these this group of kids that you know sort of winning a ton uh and having a huge advantage and that's when by made the tour de france that year a lot of teams had come out with uh you know something more of a close-fitting jersey and then the arms race started.

24:29Yeah, which I think is, you know, now is just the arms race has just exploded, as you say, in a way which almost looks more akin to like a kind of, you know, a motorsport outfit, loads of time in the wind tunnel. I think I read somewhere that, you know, someone like Ivanapol when he was still with, with Quickstep, you'd spent 10s and 10s of hours with him in the wind tunnel, which for wind tunnel purposes is a lot, right, because it's very expensive. And you get a lot of data from that time. And then he's... And it's just mind numbing. I don't even know. I mean, I've seen, I've sort of seen them.

25:05I don't really know where you sort of like start because one of the things you've got to presume you do is go, okay, we can see that this jersey is faster than this jersey. Now tell me why. And then the head scratching begins, right? Because why, you know, how do you work that out? Well, and then to get reliable data when you're writing it on a person, you know, we come to the wind tunnel with a bunch of pieces of tests and then we've got to test it at multiple speeds, yaw angles, do repeats on it. So yeah, poor Remco. I mean, there's one of those days, he was literally in the wind tunnel for like nine hours with about a half hour pizza break for lunch.

25:39He was just, he's an incredible athlete, but his work ethic of realizing what it takes to be at the high level like that. And with other riders, we've used a lot of surrogates. We'll find somebody a similar body shape and position and do a lot of the dirty work testing. I'll go through a bunch of different levels or test with that rider. And then the star will come in to kind of confirm that we were getting, we can repeat the tests on them. But Remco's like, I'm going to have to retest it anyway. So why don't I just do it from the start? And so, yeah, he's spent a lot of time sitting on that bike and you've got to replicate the position perfectly.

26:18And then we run on that around 300 watts. So we replicate some of the body movement because if you let them just kind of soft pedal, it's not the same. So they actually end up with a pretty high TSS at the end of a day. Is it difficult to sort of watch then a rider go, and probably Remco is very different because he's Remco, right, but to see a rider that you spent a lot of time on or maybe a piece of kit you spent a lot of time on and then see a rider using it in a way that's just going to be ineffective. And I'm thinking about having spoken to, and you've probably come across these guys, AeroCoach.

26:54which is a setup in the UK, which does a lot of kind of, I don't know, from amateur through to elite level rating, aerodynamically tuning stuff with people, making some skin suits and things like that. And then the guy that runs it saying like, there's this one time I just was watching a Tour de France TT stage. It was just like, no, what are you doing? We've told you that's not the body position. This is now basically making you slower. Helmets is probably a bigger thing because of the way people move their necks around. But do you get that where it's so specific to how you're sitting that if you don't sit in that way and you can't maintain it, it doesn't really work.

27:30And therefore, you kind of end up going, well, why did we bother? Because this guy's fatiguing and he can't hold that position. Yeah. I mean, my approach has always been that in the real world, guys pull stuff in on the bus. They're not just thinking about how they're wearing the clothing. so we've got to make our stuff so it's got some margin of error you know that just the fastest thing we could do would be to put an absolutely perfect trip strip along this side of the shoulder but then you know that depends on the exact position the exact speed the exact the way the guy puts it on i mean personally like do i put on my right sleeve and the left sleeve i end up with slightly different rotation from them and even when i concentrate it's really hard to do that to not do that.

28:12So we try to make it, try to test it closer to like real life of what people do. And, you know, another thing is that on the bike, you don't just hold one position, especially on the road bike. And you're moving around, even on the TT bike, there's, yeah, it changes. So we've got to make stuff that's overall fast. There's a textbook example of this, of Under Armour with the United States National Speed Skating Team. They spent something like 300 hours with Lockheed Martin making the world's fastest suit on that mannequin in the wind tunnel. And then they show up to the Olympics and they were doing lap times of like a minute or a second per kilometer slower than their old suits.

28:52Halfway through the Olympics, they grabbed their old suits, put tape over the sponsors' logos and rode out the Olympics like that. So yeah, the wind tunnel is one thing, but then bringing it to the road or to real life is another thing. Yeah, I'm always sort of amazed, though, at how, I mean, this is changing with newer, with younger riders, but how few riders typically would wear a skin suit or a kind of road suit for road stages. I get it with helmets. Helmets are obviously like, it's so such to do with ventilation. And also, yeah, if you're not holding that position, that helmet will actually, that aero helmet for a TT may actually create more drag.

29:33but it feels like anyone I've ever spoken to about aero kit will say the best bang for your buck is a skin suit, pretty much. And so then why would you not just wear that as a standard issue piece of kit for road cycling with a few pocket, you know, for road stages with a few pockets? You know, surely the breathability, the fit, everything's now able to replicate what a standard bib and jersey would. Yeah, no. What we do for road suit is really optimized for road conditions. It's a little bit different than TT. Obviously, you're down lower with a flatter back, and you've got the air coming off of your helmet a different way.

30:12So the TT suits and the road suits are engineered separately. So it's not necessarily faster to race a TT suit on the road. And then, to be honest, with a good aero jersey and short fitting correctly, we get some mixed results on between a suit and just a two-piece and you know like we what you said just a moment ago about you get a result in a wind tunnel and you don't know why we don't always know why but uh generally a road a suit will be a little bit faster but not necessarily and then you have some riders that really prefer it and then a lot of times you see the two-piece coming back out is uh on those really hot races where they just feel a little bit cooler with uh the two-piece or the jersey in short but yeah at the at the pro level what is it now probably 80 percent of the guys are out there in in a one-piece suit and then and this i'm not sure if you necessarily have an answer to this but something i will often think about looking at other sports is except for maybe swimming how seemingly how little attention is paid to aerodynamics with kit and just thinking of the uh what was the last year of the olympics was it 20 24?

31:25Do we have an Olympics? Yeah. And there's a guy in 100 meters and he was just wearing a jersey, you know, he's wearing a vest, a baggy vest, and he had pretty long hair and quite a few like, I don't know, piercings or something. You know, he just didn't look super slippery. And I know he's only going to run 9.78 seconds or whatever it is. But you think, surely there's something in it at every single level. The guy at Ferrari is totally wrong. Aerodynamics is everywhere at all times 200k yeah probably more so but do you ever look at other sports and go yeah maybe we should move back into football and bring something to them because at the end of the day if you can move you know more more easily through the air then you save energy so at the very least you're fresher for extra time or yeah if you can run a marathon in something that's like less baggy isn't that better surely yeah yeah but and for the marathon when they've tried to do these some two-hour marathons and they brought quite a bit of aerodynamics into it yeah that's true yeah but yeah at the standard competition level running and he still has a ways to go um actually the italian national uh sailing team came to us before paris with to look for advice because the guys on the windsurfs or they're now the the foils yeah i mean those those guys are going through the air 80k an hour and you know we just think of the way the wind hits it but they're going yeah they're cutting through the air and so air will even make sense in in sailing which is insane well didn't yeah didn't even think of that so thinking about riders then uh mentioned remco but over the years you've worked with some amazing riders across sportful and castelli i think you had sagan was a sportful rider you had frume obviously and all of the guys at sky for a number of years including garen thomas as well he had contador early days i think he had paolo batini maybe which of those not necessarily those guys but which riders stick out to you as being like i loved working with that rider they were just so brilliantly useful to our projects and receptive and then which one would you you know which one sort of stick out as like man that was like pulling teeth that was that person was a challenge and i'm not asking it additionally dirt but more like you know what are those yeah yeah um it's actually funny because you kind of hit like a the star list of people you've worked with.

33:49And a couple that really jump out, Froome is an absolute pleasure to work with, not only for his work ethic, but he's like probably one of the biggest cycling fans of any of those people you've named and just absolutely love cycling, right? And sometimes you just find him and his hands are all dirty because he's been working on his bike, right? And Froome Sky also, Kwiatkowski is an absolute gem. And then some of the other names that aren't on that list, Nathan Haas, we were there for his first day at team training camp when he moved out to Garmin, which we still work with him now through gravel and everything until he retired at the end of last year.

34:32and then writer Hayes Jadal was always a really laid back Canadian stuff but with a big drive in his own way and just David Miller obviously because he his redemption thing was Sonia Duvall which also was right after we bought Castelli which the only guy that would give us a chance either was Mauro Gianetti and Sonia Duvall so that's when we started with David and just stayed friends and worked together on chapter 3 And David is a cyclist intellectual. Super fun to be around. It's just approached the whole thing. I reckon a while ago, the bike computer market looked all sewn up. There were two big players, end of.

35:17Kind of like how once upon a time group sets meant either Shimano or Campagnolo. So there's a wonderful synergy in the fact SRAM busted open the group set market back in 2006. and now SRAM's computer arm Hammerhead is blowing the doors off in the same way with the Hammerhead Karoo. My favourite thing about the Karoo is how much it's like a smartphone. So the touchscreen is really crisp and punchy so data and mapping which is way more like a phone's mapping than a classic bike GPS by the way. Those things are super clear but unlike a phone battery life is a huge 35 hours with GPS on and your ride recording plus it's also way smaller.

35:54It's up there with the smallest head units given what it does and it does loads from predicting gradients in real time to making routes on the fly to running apps like Spotify and it will even tell you how fast you're going. There's a whole lot more that we'll get into in other episodes but for anyone who just needs things now now now head over to cyclist.co.uk and search Hammerhead Crew 3 to read our in-depth review and find out why we gave it our cyclist recommended badge of honour. Then head to hammerhead.io and use the promo code cyclist to get a free heart rate monitor with every purchase of a karoo.

36:30Just make sure we put everything in the basket first before applying that promo code cyclist, promo code hammerhead.io is where you can find all the gear.

36:45Switching tack to us amateurs, what's your best-selling piece of kit and what does that tell you about you know where kind of the amateur cycling appetites are versus what it would have been 10 years ago yeah i mean winter time is definitely still in our whole profetto line that that stuff that's made for not the super cold conditions but cool cold um mixed conditions of wet and dry and yet people are still willing to to invest into a good winter jacket which is good to see too i mean we kind of we keep thinking that winter cycling is dead because of indoor training but winter business for us is still really good whereas in the summer what we've seen a shift on is that there used to be a lot more uptake of the pro level stuff of the aero jerseys aero you know the top of line the pro level race short where we've seen a big shift into our what we call the espresso line so this is stuff that's made to be look great feel great be really the the first thing you just automatically pull out of your drawer for every day except for when you put a number on that's kind of our goal with it is like we oh i mean it didn't end up being our most expensive stuff it's kind of a mid-range price wise but just that absolute focus on that comfort and utility of the way the pockets work and just how it feels on and also with giving a lot of colors so it actually you know you're happy to pair and mix up the mix and match the colors and so your daily rider stuff is what uh it has a lot more resonance now than it used to and do you think there'd ever be a time where cycling apparel in general jerseys and things would exist as they do to a football fan in cycling because i always think of like you know occasionally see some older dudes wearing like a mape you know kind of like old or la vie claire the old kind of shell suit baggy training tops for your hard winter miles probably have zero thermal properties really but and i say that looks really cool and the idea that someone buys a pro jersey now and wears it or a pro jacket or something i'm sad to say it's kind of they get laughed at a bit there's a stigma attached to that yeah do you think that could change or is that maybe even like a cultural thing here in the uk am i speaking absolute bobbins if it was talking about italy would italy have more people riding in team kit maybe slightly more but no it's it's kind of universal So kind of wearing the pro stuff is at an all-time low.

39:11And for a long time, I kind of said it ebbs and flows. And I thought it was ebbing for a while. But if you think about, though, back 15 years ago or so, I mean, if you wanted to get good kit, you kind of ended up with pro kit, replica kit. Because a lot of inline or non-pro stuff was kind of mediocre. And then kind of the industry, we started working really hard at making our normal stuff be even better than what the pros can race for because just racing has required an absolute minimalism and fit and singular focus on speed whereas uh for normal riding we can spec out the the stuff a bit more and i mean we've done the same thing with our bikes right i mean we were on the fatter tires and disc brakes and more of an upright position and a more comfort saddle but long before the pros did.

40:03Yeah. No, yeah. Yeah. That totally makes sense. And another, you know, another big conversation that's been going on for a long time now, as in like a couple of years, is the transition from, and I need to get this right. So PFAs. So I'm going to say mangle this completely. Perfluorocarbons, is that right? Petrochemicals. PFAS. Yeah. So bad chemicals that unfortunately made really good jackets. The industry's had to move away from that because there's been various bans on certain chemicals that used to make up things like Gore-Tex. First question, can you kind of give a better explanation than the one I've just given of the situation because that was mangled and terrible?

40:44And then second one, like, how has that affected our clothing? Yeah, so these perfluoral substances are kind of everywhere, right? There's something like 16 ,000 different substances that are classified under this PFAS umbrella. And you often hear of them described as forever chemicals. So it's a long chain of carbon atoms with a number of fluorine atoms making up the molecule. And these things, they just don't break down in nature, but they're really, really good at repelling water and especially oils. That's what made them so great for everything. probably your tablecloth at home has PFAS on it.

41:26So anything that's called stain resistant probably has PFAS in it. And your carpets have PFAS. And all your food containers, a lot of them have PFAS just because it's just magic. You wipe it on the stuff. And yeah, and then it protects pretty well. But these chemicals, besides being bad for the environment, just of hanging around forever, they also accumulate in the body. and there's like we don't know exactly what they do but there's been enough research done that especially at higher concentration levels it can be carcinogenic and so yeah it's almost like a like tobacco back in the 50s right it was like we started to figure out yeah this stuff is bad and trying to move off so yeah the the really led by the outdoor industry of getting ahead of legislation of saying like we got to get this stuff out of our clothing um because like all your clothing up until the early 2010s definitely had a PFAS water repellent finish to it.

42:26Anything that was water repellent was PFAS back then. And then, yeah, slowly we've been pulling it out of clothing wherever we could and trying to replace it with something better. But the kind of unfortunate part is that the substitutes in terms of the coatings, the water repellent coatings that are in the industry parlance, it's called a durable water repellent. The non-PFAS ones are not very durable and not that water repellent and tend to wash out pretty quick. So we're still struggling to replace that. In our specific use for cycling with Castelli, it was powerful. For a long time, we used mostly Gore Windstopper or Gore-Tex water protection in the winter.

43:07And the membrane itself had PFAS in it as well. So five years ago, we started working on trying to find a replacement to get out of the PFAS. And what we just found is that the entire, what the PFAS did for us, it allowed us to make a membrane that was both water and windproof, yet breathable. And in taking the PFAS out, we kind of had to pick or choose. Like we couldn't really make anything that was waterproof and breathable. And everybody's went to kind of headlong to waterproof because we've heard all of our lives that our outdoor clothing has to be waterproof. But we were kind of shocked at like how little breathability they were able to give to that waterproofness.

43:49And so I started to think really about what cyclists are doing. And we're just, we're not riding the rain the way we used to, right? I mean, anybody that's seriously training has a phenomenal indoor setup. And they'll actually be skipping some outdoor workouts because they can get a better training load on the trainer. And then with global warming, climate change, there's fewer days of rain. The total amount of rain is coming down the same amount. It's just more concentrated. But fewer days that you have to ride in the rain. When I tell this to anyone that lives in the UK, that's not really the case.

44:28Even you guys, it shows up on the data that's a few fewer days of rain. And then we have an up-to-the-minute weather forecast localized in our pockets. right so we can pick and choose our time of day and where we're where we're gonna ride maybe you'll go south instead of north just because it's because of where the rain goes and so you know we started to think about this and then kind of the epiphany moment for me was at uh 2022 23 tour of flanders sportif that it just absolutely horrible day and even though we had stuff like the profetto jacket that were ostensibly waterproof like on that really bad day everybody pulls out a proper rain cape right so if we don't have to make our stuff for the worst days because people are going to wear a proper rain cape and we're just not riding in the rain that much like how much if we push really hard on breathability putting you know accepting a compromise on water protection like how how much better breathability could we get and so i partnered up with polar tech uh who they have an absolutely brilliant uh engineer that took on this problem and and uh maybe anyone wants like all the details on it again there's we've done a few podcasts with the engineer Ramesh uh Keshe and uh talk about how we did it but actually made a product that is significantly like just hardly comparable uh breathability while maintaining a pretty high level of water protection actually 5 ,000 millimeter water column and adding in stretch and ostensibly making a superior product than what we have with PFAS.

46:02Just by taking, you know, you start out with the problem looking at its breathability instead of waterproofness and kind of backed into the water protection. So I'm super proud of that one of like making a product that's better in most every way with the sustainability. Yeah. And that's because I think we tested this, one of the guys, is that the Air Corps in the new RS? the Raynaud Shire which is, am I sort of again right in saying that Perfetto ultimately replaced the Gabba in that kind of almost like soft Shelly kind of jersey vibe I know you've got the very I don't know what the 2007 team would have made of the Gabba R David Miller may have worn it if anyone that is listening hasn't seen it look it up the Gabba R it's a statement, it's also a great piece of kit, I've tested it but it's also a statement to look at, it's very tight very shiny, very black.

46:56But yeah, so with the Perfetto Act, does that sort of replace a GABA? Yeah, so let's go back in time. And GABA came up because Gabriel Roche, nicknamed GABA, writing for Cervelo Test Team, he was the one kind of planted the seed of like, hey, you know, we need something not for the worst conditions because like you pull out a rain jacket when it's not that cold, you've got that big jacket flapping around and you overheat, you get wet from the inside. So I was asking for something a little less protective, Let's just keep our body, our core warm. And he kind of even said, you know, if water gets in, that's not a problem.

47:30We just need to say enough warmth. So that was the start of the GABA. And initially, we were going to call that thing the rain race jacket. No, aero rain race jacket. It's kind of a catchy name. Catchy, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And then so we made up the samples and tested. When we brought the kit for the whole team, the surveillance test team, like all the riders were saying like this is the gaba jacket like the one that gaba contributed on so the riders nicknamed it gaba and before we brought it to the market i looked up on uh did a quick google search and nothing came up under gaba and then uh after we had it on market for like two years the danish company that actually has a trademark on gaba came knocking and and uh wanted their gaba back and so we kind of deal with them yeah what were they then what What was their GABA?

48:22Well, GABA is a men's fashion company. So if you look up GABA.dk, I'll put in a plug for them. I've only ever heard of it as some incredibly mad hardcore that's one of music. Yeah, yeah. So with the actual owners of the GABA trademark, we cut a deal. So we actually have a license to use GABA in cycling, which we've gone back to just using on the original short-sleeved jacket. So back before or until they came knocking, we were calling the long sleeve gaba yeah we're calling the long sleeve gaba um and when we cut the deal with them on the licensing we agreed that we would just use it on the short sleeve jacket the actual gaba and that's when we put the profetto name onto the long sleeve gaba so gaba the profetto is just a name and profetto means perfect in italian we picked that just because we had so many people telling us like this is just the perfect jacket so yeah kind of the jacket in the name itself.

49:13So it is. It is the Garber Long Sleeve. So this is something I wanted to ask you about. A man of fabrics and materials, as you are, working and cycling, can you kind of pithily explain waterproof ratings? And then, and I keep giving you a kind of answer question A, then question B. So I'm sorry, I'll let you sit with that one first and then I'll ask you the next question. But yeah, can you kind of pithily explain what it is when someone says this is 5 ,000 millimeters like you just did about the uh about the fetal rs yeah what are we talking about there okay so there's actually a machine that does this test where they make you cut out a little like a 10 centimeter round piece of the fabric and you mount it into a um into a frame that holds it still and then piece that comes down on it that completely seals with it and you pressurize water to see how much water will come through so an easy way to imagine is imagine if you have a tube 10 centimeters wide that goes up.

50:12And you had, when they say 5 ,000 millimeters, which is kind of silly, why don't we just say five meters, right? Because it's the same thing. But I mean, if you think of like when you go snorkeling, if you go down to two meters of depth, like you can already feel in your ears, right? I mean, if you go to five meters, you feel like your head's going to explode. So that's actually quite a bit of pressure. So that's what we're talking. It's called a hydrostatic head equivalent because we don't have a five meter tube, but we have a thing that pressurizes the water. And so we measure how much that fabric can hold before water starts to come through.

50:47And so somehow the outdoor industry in most countries got governments to accept that a legal definition of waterproof should be 10 ,000 millimeters, 10 meters of water. That's a lot of pressure. Rainfalls, like a standard kind of light rain, falls at the equivalent of 800 millimeters. So one twelfth the legal definition. I mean, 10 ,000 millimeters you might get if you sit on a wet bench or kneel down in a puddle, right? Hard driving rain is about 2 ,000 millimeters. So I think we, as the industry's kind of done itself a disservice because you don't need 10 ,000 millimeters for cycling like we do.

51:30I mean, even like riding full speed into the rain, it'll come down at maybe 2 ,000 millimeters. as far as the pressure on the front of the garment. And then with all the technology we have, there's still, if we're going to increase the waterproofness, we're going to decrease the breathability. And so you think, okay, if 10 ,000 is good, there's fabrics out there that are 20 ,000. But already 10 ,000 is a level you're not going to ever encounter. And then you're going to double that and have even less breathability. So all you're doing is making sure you get wet from the inside. right i was gonna say because my experience and it flies against everything you just said is from doing lots of you know lots of riding lots of jacket tests particularly from a journalist point of view 5 000 is sort of i i'd feel like that will give me a bit of bit of protection in a bit of rain 10 000 is decent but if it's like heavy heavy english rain then i need a 20 000 garment that's actually going to be what I would deem to be waterproof i.e.

52:33water doesn't get through because those other two the five and the ten anecdotally do feel like they wet out and I know that one conjecture would be like no no you're sweating but I'm pretty sure I can't sweat that much and I know that the difference and the same I'd say maybe a better version of that is hiking stuff where I'm definitely working less hard and if I'm just out and about wearing a jacket i've got a commuting jacket right which if i just wear about it's 10 000 um millimeters that would just event that will kind of wet out after like an hour and it'll start leaking whereas i've got a hiking jacket if i wear that and about just walking then i'm i'm pretty good so don't we need those higher waterproof ratings despite the fact that the rain is theoretically only going at 800 mil yeah so you're probably tending to grab that 20 000 when it's raining harder, right?

53:31Yeah. And you're doing a lower intensity activity, whereas the 5 ,000 millimeter is probably a higher intensity. But your body can sweat about three liters an hour. So yeah, you can get a lot of moisture into the jacket. And when you are testing that, or you're using that 5 ,000 millimeter jacket at a when it's actually wet out because what we don't ever really talk about is that for those jackets to breathe there actually has to be somewhere for the water to go and if outside of the jacket is completely saturated like the fabric is wet it's it's the the air has a hundred percent relative humidity it's not like we have little one-way valves in in that fabric right it's It's a membrane, and so through osmolysis, we're trying to reach equilibrium on the saturation of the air.

54:31And so when you hear that 100 % relative humidity on the outside, all we hear is 100 % humidity, right? But there's that other word in there called relative that nobody ever thinks about this as like relative to what? And it's actually relative to the temperature because warm air can hold, like it was 30 degree air it can hold like 300 times more moisture than zero degree air and so when we're warmer on the inside with and sweat it out just because it's warm on the inside and in the outside we can push some of the moisture across the membrane but yeah when it's 100 % humidity on the outside 100 % on the inside especially where there's less of a temperature gradient uh then there's not really anywhere to push that moisture across the membrane And so that breathability really comes into play more on drier conditions where a higher breathability garment, if you go out on a dry day at 60%, 50 % humidity, a good breathing garment, you can stay.

55:32We'll do like a three-hour ride in that air core stuff, pull it off, and the base layer is bone dry. But if I did that same ride in a rainy day, I could actually have some moisture on the inside, even though the membrane hasn't failed at all. okay interesting so is i mean is it basically nonsense then if people say my you know my the gore-tex wears out for example or the membrane has failed is that just not physically scientifically possible yes and no i mean there's it is a delicate little membrane in there so yeah you know it does happen if you stretch even if you stretch the fabric a lot there you know like a a Gore-Tex membrane doesn't stretch at all.

56:15So you could actually rupture the membrane on the inside and not really realize it unless you hold it up to light. And then the other thing is that for those fabrics, especially the Gore-Tex, because Gore-Tex had enough water could come through. Gore-Tex really worked well when you had a good DWR. That water is going to finish on the outside so the water wouldn't set up in the fabric. because Gore-Tex, if you're the outer layer saturated, that water could, through osmosis, come in as much as it could go out. And so the Gore-Tex membrane worked really well with the PFAS DWR because it protected water from getting to the membrane from the outside.

57:00So yeah, a jacket that's lost is DWR, especially a Gore-Tex jacket, will carry some of that across. And then an awful lot of the other jackets that you'll see are using a polyurethane membrane. That polyurethane by its nature is hydrophilic. So it will tend to absorb whatever moisture gets into it from the inside or the outside. So yeah, in those cases, they might test really well on that hydrostatic head that I mentioned because it takes a while to absorb the moisture before it actually wets out. But in the hydrostatic head tests, it will do really well. So, yeah, the way the membrane, the material of the membrane can have a significant difference, especially when you're out in the wet for a longer time.

57:45Yeah. But, again, this conversation has just gone towards this extreme condition of riding in the rain. And the listeners here, I challenge how many of us have actually done that intentionally. And then I'm thinking of myself the times I get caught in the rain. if there's a day where I think I'm going to get caught in the rain, I might, even if I have a product that's kind of rain or shine, I might probably throw like a really thin proper rain cape, like shell layer in the pocket. So, you know, are we expecting too much of our all-purpose gear for it to protect in the worst conditions? And then, you know, if I was doing a week-long bikepacking tour where there's one of those days I got to get it from a hotel A to B, and I'm going to go out there for six hours in the rain, I'm going to come prepared for that which is a different garment than the stuff I want to use day in and day out all winter long where I'm not going to get caught in the rain that much or if it rains for a bit if I've got an hour of protection before it wets out at all then that's probably good enough and we can plan for that because our weather forecasts are pretty good so if I don't have to cover you in the very worst possible conditions I can make you way more comfortable for everything else gotcha okay i still want to ask you about shake dry though if that's all right because where because that felt a bit like a gabba moment where so again i'm sure everyone's heard of this but just in case they haven't shake dry gore-tex material from the parent company ended up in cycling jackets and was ostensibly marketed as this is the membrane that is in a gore-tex jacket This is almost Gore-Tex in its purest form.

59:26So the jackets were considered really quite fragile. They looked very bin bag-esque as well. They were just because you couldn't really, there was a moment in time where you couldn't really do anything with them printing wise because it would just obviously upset the properties of the membrane. They weren't stretchy, but they were insanely waterproof, like a bin bag waterproof where you just knew if there's moisture on the inside, that came from you, not from the rain. Can those be made anymore? or is that just has that level of performance gone or am i just imagining the whole thing was it never really that good in the first place and it just looked like it should be and was marketed well and it was just as good as any other jacket that was a high-end waterproof jacket yeah no it was it was special um and indeed that outer surface that looked like the plastic bin bag kind of thing that was well let's call it relatively pure ptfe is the material that's used for for gore-tex and And PTFE, you know it by its trade name as Teflon, right?

1:00:26So your Teflon pans, you put a drop of water on that and it runs right off, right? So that's what your shake dry jacket did. It's like one of the reasons why it was close to magic was because like we were just talking about, there's no way for moisture to actually build up on the outside in contact with the membrane because you could literally shake it dry because the moisture wouldn't stick to the outside of the membrane. So the waterproofness of it was really helped by that. Basically, you had a Teflon on the outside, so nothing would actually have the chance to go through the membrane. And then because you think of Teflon being one of the most non-stick materials we know, and when we make a fabric out of it, somehow we have to stick a textile layer to that membrane.

1:01:11So there's a lot of pretty fancy chemistry and voodoo involved in making that happen. But every time to make that textile component stick to the membrane component, you lose a lot of the breathability. So with ShakeDry, you only had textile on the inside to give that thing a bit of strength to it so it wouldn't just tear apart. But on the outside, you had pure PTFE trying to breathe. But of course, PFAS is what made that all possible. So Gore stopped making that product. And it's funny you ask about that because just earlier this week, I was at Polartec headquarters with their engineers. They have like 120 PhD chemists on staff.

1:01:52And the challenge was like that's the gold standard that we need to try to reach in terms of waterproofness, breathability. And the thing that was cool about it too was it was insanely light. I mean, the whole jacket was like 100 grams and folded up into half a pocket. So yeah, shake dry was something. I think probably a lot of people listening to this have one or two of those stashed away. So the advice to use is keep using that while you can. No reason to throw it away now. I mean, the damage has been done, so might as well enjoy it. Yeah, I mean, I find it amazing in a way that it's like there was this moment in time where the thing that's now passed was better and actually it's trying to find, you know, finding one is a bit like you know it's like finding pulling hen's teeth and then you know if you've got one that is the advice you know keep hold keep hold of it because i ain't going to make any more and is that what i mean for an industry insider point of view is that what's kind of done for gore in the bike industry because gore bike wear has now you know closed its doors gore-tex the parent company does all kinds of things that isn't just cycling or making materials for cycling but was it that that essentially changed gore's gore bikeway's fortunes because it could no i don't think so um you know in cycling we look at gore where is a big player but i'm just guessing the total turnover of gore where i don't know between 25 and 40 million but that's inside i think eight or nine billion dollar company um so and you know gore makes their money off of medical services.

1:03:30So when we get to that age to have to get stents put in, that's when we'll be using Gore again. And firefighter suits are still using Gore-Tex. And there's a lot of the use of that PTFE still. Within that big organization, you've got a tiny little division. And I think there was a Gore employee quoted in a cycling publications saying that they just didn't see a path towards profitability for that division you know because the post-covid correction's been pretty tough on the cycling industry so i imagine you know hit gore gore where like hit everybody and they don't see a path towards profitability you know why would you keep a division open yeah such a tiny tiny part of the company so yeah yeah that totally makes sense so where then if you had like a kind of blank slate i've got to design some your gear for 2027, 28, where do you start looking for inspiration and what ends up influencing you?

1:04:32Yeah. So on a technical side, there's kind of two big areas that I think are still ripe for more innovation. And we've talked a lot here about that cold to wet conditions, clothing. And I think with AeroCore, we've got a really nice piece that's super breathable with a decent amount of water protection, but it's still not the piece you'd go out. If you had to go out and do a three-hour club run on Saturday morning, it's probably not the first piece you would go for. But having learned from Air Corps, we think we can push it to make that. The needle kind of fell this direction. Now we're pretty sure we can make a piece that is absolutely waterproof for that three-hour rain ride, but significantly more breathable than anything else out there.

1:05:21So that's a challenge for us to try to make that piece for us. I mean, it's almost a localized need because people in the UK, Belgium, Holland, I'm from Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, those are places that that garment has a place for us. And then the other one is that just with global warming, and it's just even in the UK, right? you guys had 40 degree days was in the summer before last hot weather clothing i mean we're just we're pretty rudimentary right now of like any way of actual functional cooling there's a few pieces a few things are out there kind of i've you know used the word that was described to me that just gimmicks more than anything um you know we got some better breathability and some evaporative cooling to it but i i think there's still somebody's going to figure that one out to make stuff that actually actively cools you.

1:06:17So, you know, when we can go out and ride on a day that's high 30s, go through 40 degrees, and be completely comfortable, almost like having air conditioning in your car, someday somebody's going to figure it out. So why don't we just push that? And when that happens, that'll be the new Gabba, Shake Dry, and Aero Jersey all combined. The game changers, the end-all game changers. Yeah. I mean, because look at the Tour de France. I mean, there's those days when the heat that's really driving the whole racing conditions. But even for us, I mean, just living in Italy here, second half of July into August, there's some days when it's just like you don't really want to go outside that much because it's so hot.

1:07:03I remember somebody saying, this is why this race will never catch on in the cycling industry because the cycling industry is predominantly Italian and Italians don't ride in the rain. so rim brakes are fine for us thank you very much yeah exactly well Steve thank you so much for your time we've massively overrun so sorry about that but no it's really interesting really good stuff and yeah look forward to seeing more coming up from Costelli I'm sure you've got some stuff up your sleeve for spring summer and everything else never stop thanks James it's been fun take care Steve Smith, ladies and gentlemen Will, is this going to make you reassess what you wear on a day out cycling or actually, are you one of those people who have you sort of stopped cycling outdoors now?

1:07:53Because that's what a lot of brands say they make less winter kit because more people don't go out in this country when it's crap weather because of things like Zwift and Ruvie I'm not a massive one on the indoor indoor thing i'll do it if i've got you know often we get products to try and i'll happily you know give it a go but i don't it's not something that i do for pleasure okay um i think there's something really nice about riding in the cold the interesting thing that i thought was thinking about the other day and you'll be able to probably relate to this is that the whole sort of thing around here people don't ride outside the winter anymore but then you have races like we've seen last week in paris nice where it's disgusting and it is winter but the kit has to be ready for winter and rain so yeah it has to be made for the winter and the rain that is true but there's difference between the sort of you know the honest finger guard was wearing extra thermals over the top of his jersey his skin suit and he looked like he had dungarees on and it was flapping about and the they'd taken out the stitching to the pad would come out so he wouldn't have two pads on surely just have a kit that works well i mean as my erstwhile colleague steve owens used to say i've seen more meat on a butcher's pencil here's a skinny man isn't he jonas vinegar so i can kind of i can imagine that even for all of the brushed roubaix fleece line thermal fabrics in cycle them is not enough to keep dear jonas who let's face it comes from a cold country so he should be pretty good at these sorts of things and used to work packing fish in an ice factory or packing fish with ice in a factory.

1:09:36Packing fish in an ice factory. There's just fish on the side as they make the ice. But I think he said afterwards he was sufficiently loaded. Excellent. Excellent. Okay, great. Did he do well? That's how I'm in touch with cycling. He won that day, yeah. Good for him. Okay, so that worked. There'll probably be some dungarees coming our way. Who's the Lisa Bike Kit sponsor? Nimble. Nimble. They make kit. They do. Well, maybe Nimble's going to be bringing out the patented Jonas Dungarees. Extra Dungarees, yeah. Well, to be honest, I'm already preparing for the Tour de France kit to have, like, the jersey will just have the black straps on.

1:10:15Yeah, brilliant. Perfect. A little bit like the old Carrera kit, the old Carrera jeans kit. There should be more kit that has pictures of normal clothes as the kit. A bit like, you know, the aprons where it's just like you've got a six-pack, the barbecue aprons. Or maybe they just have one when they got sick back. When they got sick, yeah, when they got sick back. What's his face? The old tall masculine Italian guy with a slightly checkered recent history. Cipollini. That's the guy. He did a good line in skin seats once upon a time, didn't he? He had the Seiko. He had the one that was like the muscle fibers.

1:10:51Yeah, yeah, that was a good one. Yeah, and then he also showed up at some point at a race dressed as like a kind of ancient, like a Julius Caesar in a toga. not on the start line just kind of came out on the balconies presided over the press Do you reckon Roman soldiers were Aero? Were Roman soldiers Aero? I think if they you know when they did the thing with the shields and they marched which I take from Asterix books which I assume are politically historically correct if they made the right shape like that kind of airfoil with their shields then yes individually I would say no it depends on what the helmet's like yeah but the helmets flared out at the bottom a little bit like a sort of kind of copper or whatever they make do they make them from copper, gold, something like that iron, but like a bob just a little bit like the POC helmets that came out a while ago on the track, do you remember those ones that looked a little bit like Bo Peep they were apparently quite aero but maybe not various different degrees of yaw on the battlefield, I just don't know anyway we should probably legends of yore legends of yore the yore legends of yore we should wrap this up but this leaves me one last thing to say because I must because it's great we have our cyclist magazine track days although google cyclist track days and then you'll find out what I'm talking about don't put magazine in there but we've got our cyclist track days coming up over the next couple of months and I reckon you should go down because you can test some of the best bikes in cycling hands down all in one place ever, which you just can't do.

1:12:30I mean, I don't even know if you can go to a shop and get a bike these days. Everything's online, isn't it? Oh, the internet. So you can go and see these bikes in real life, Saturday, 9th of May, Lee Valley Velo Park in London, and also Sunday, the 10th of May, Lee Valley Velo Park, London. And then we've also got another date in Leeds at the Brownlee Centre, named after, yes, the Brownlees, Saturday, the 6th of June, 2026. that's 2026 it's this year isn't it and we've also got a cyclist gravel track day so we've all heard about gravel bikes haven't we they're like road bikes but they go off road and they're kind of cool and everyone wants one and you don't know which one you should buy or you don't know what to do with your dad on father's day either way sunday the 21st of june which is father's day go down to hern hill with your dad or if you're a dad go down to hern hill and say it's your gift to yourself and try some of the best gravel bikes going around the Herne Hill outside the track because it's classic.

1:13:27Classic track is Herne Hill. There's also a really good gravel track around it. So we have those and we also have some cycling electric track days and I can't find the links. I can't tell you when they are, but we also do this with e-bikes. So do look it up. Cycling electric. Will's busy tapping away on his phone. He's going to find it for me to redeem me in front of my employers and anyone listening, particularly our lovely editor, Mark, on Cycling Electric. Will's phone is loading. He's got poor signal, poor coverage in his area. Yes, I am. Thank you. Cycling Electric demo days. 19th of April, Lee Valley, Velo Park.

1:14:04Yes. 7th of June, Brownlee Center, Leeds. Yes. Obviously, Alistair Brownlee, friend of the show. Friend of the show, indeed. 14th of June, Bath, Odd Down. You'll be there, I'm sure. I will be there. I will be there. I will be there. I genuinely will be there. Finally, 5th of July at Turnhill. Oh, yeah. There we go. So just in case you didn't sort of clock the differences, we do a road bike one, we do a gravel bike one, and we do an e-bike one. And you can go along, test out bikes to your heart's content, get a lovely lunch. Genuinely, a lovely lunch. And I can't think how much it costs, but I know it's actually really cheap.

1:14:41Way cheaper than a pint. Yeah. and much cheaper than the bike we were talking about earlier, which I'm sad to say won't be there because we just don't have the insurance budget to have 12, 20 grand bikes for you to test out. But we do have dozens and dozens and dozens of other bikes. Will's just nodding his head. Yeah, I thought you said it excellently. Yeah, brilliant. Okay, cool. Right. Thanks, guys. Thanks for listening. And we'll be back next time, two weeks' time, with some more cycling and some more Inane chat. If you listen this far, one day we'll start sending out badges a bit like adam buxton probably does in his podcast anyway thanks very much um and we look forward to uh you joining us in a few weeks time hello lovely listeners i just wanted to tell you that cyclist isn't just a podcast no cyclist is also a beautiful print magazine it's packed full of all the best rides from around the world the newest bikes and kit, and loads of in-depth articles featuring guests just like on today's show.

1:15:49So head on over to cyclist.co.uk slash subscriptions and check out our latest Cyclist Magazine subscription offers.