162. The simple (yet complicated) truth behind bike design, with Chris Dodman

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2:47Welcome back to the Cyclist Magazine podcast I was just saying to Will who is joining me down the end of a wire it's been ages since I've done this it feels I've been off on paternity leave that's why there's an insight into my life I've had another child so I'm twice as tired but I have missed your face Will and our listeners don't need to know that personal tidbit so tell me, tell me about some cycling Some cycling. There's a race on. There's a race on. There's one. Have you heard of it? It goes in parts of France normally. The Tour of France. That one. As Sean Kelly says, the Tour of France.

3:19I love how he steadfastly says that. We are in the final week. I feel like it will be a lot more progress by the time people listen to this than it is now. But we can... It will be. We're recording this on Monday and it's going out on Thursday. But going into the rest day, I don't know, some stuff has happened, but my gaze is looking elsewhere at the moment. I feel my family life is distracting me a lot. I haven't been keeping up. I only had space for football, put it that way. Now that's over. Now that's over. I've glanced at the cycling. It looks like Pogaccia's doing insanely well. And I've kind of kept up with it a little bit through headlines and I'm just left scratching my head being like, if you're really into cycling, which, you know, whisper it, I'm not massively, but you are, Will.

4:03Is it actually quite exciting? or do you kind of go, oh, please, can we actually have a rivalry that really matters? It's a really weird one because it's not a surprise that he's dominated. I feel like anyone in the sane mind who isn't trying to come across as a contrarian will have been absolutely sure that Pogaccio would have smacked everyone at this race. It's a bit boring to see it happen and, you know, especially so early, it was so obvious. whereas before you know vingard hold on for for a while but it kind of felt like pre-crash now vingard's out pre-crash it sort of felt like he'd lost all of his all of his kicks so he was even getting distance on the short finishes and that right was on the wall then unless without a really dramatic day in the third week he was never going to get any time back but if you then on the other hand ignore pogaccia quite difficult he's wearing yellow it's quite bright and easy to spot and he does kind of dictate the race even when he's you know not trying to win it himself it's actually probably with the best more closely fought gc for years apart from him especially now that vingegaard's out because vingegaard was kind of a step ahead but even then he got dropped on saturday at the end last few seconds from him down what we now be like second to sixth it's a very good race actually so if you just forget that Pogacar exists this should be a really entertaining third week and it will have gone slightly different by the time this goes out because we've got a time trial next so Remco Ebenapol should get another big chunk of time so it could be that before we get to the Big Martins it seems like he's secured second however we all know that Remco can have a day and lose 10 minutes so wouldn't rule out anyone rule out Del Toro second Paul Sexias second.

5:54I was going to say, where is Paul Sexias? I did listen to our podcast, which you did brilliantly with Ned Bolting, and as Ned pointed out, he's 19, and what was Pogacar doing when he was 19? He wasn't, in theory, as good as Paul Sexias, but I'm not really sure. Have we seen his best yet? It's difficult to know if we've seen his best because he looked better earlier in the season. However, he's maybe like 20 seconds off the podium. It's pretty good. That's true, yeah. It's pretty good. And he's looking, it's difficult to compare to del Toro, but off the current podium of Evan Paul and del Toro, who got a chunk of time, maybe for 30, 40 seconds on Sunday, he looks better than the others.

6:34He dragged Florian Lipovitz all the way up the mountain. I used to struggle and lost a big chunk of time. He looks good. He came into the race a bit banged up from a crash at the Tour Overnier-Rona-Alp, formerly known as the Dauphiné. But you kind of maybe would have expected him to be a bit more offensive, but the problem is that when everyone's on the limit, you can't really attack when Pogaccia's dictating the pace. But it'll be very interesting to see how he goes in this final week, especially because he's got good TT, so he could be on the podium by the end of Tuesday. Well, there we go. And you, dear listeners, will know more about it than we when this goes out.

7:10And you'll also maybe have dissected this more over the coming days, but Vinigard crashing after having had his door knocked on at 2am in the morning with doping control, who then did Pogaccia at 5am, which I feel is a little bit unfair that you go for the guy that's chasing in the middle of the night who then has to get back to sleep, whereas arguably he could just sort of get up at 5. Do you reckon that was the reason why he crashed? I wouldn't say it's the reason, but I saw he said that he obviously didn't want to say that was the reason, but he also did say it definitely wouldn't have helped.

7:46It is mad, though, because I was reading like the whatever kind of regulatory body it is that decides this is how they're going to test and they're like no we stick by this we got to do it we've got to make sure cycling is clean and this is one way of doing it but it's bonkers isn't it like the idea that you can someone can just bang on your door in the middle of the night in a sport where we're always told by sports scientists and anyone worth their salt the key to winning the Tour de France beyond being Pogaccia is being able to recover the quickest your sleep is absolutely key and so to have that disrupted in that way seems really grossly unfair even you know irrespective of whether or not it might have had knock-on effects to somebody crashing and also yeah to do it in a way where you're penalized more potentially depending on when they decide to knock during that night I think that's the point is that it needs to be even and fair if you're going to do it like who knows whether it's worse to get work up at 2am and be able to go back to sleep or woke up at five and have to stick it out, I would probably prefer 2am and be able to go back to sleep.

8:47That was the question I was going to ask you. Which would you prefer? Yeah. Get up. I mean, humans are made for a couple of four-hour or-ish stints anyway with a bit of wake-up time around then. That is what they say by phasic sleeping. Yeah, so really, he probably got a better sleep than he would have done if he just slept through. Whereas Pogaccio just stayed up from five and was probably pretty tired from listening to Eminem and having loads of coffee before the race started. We should probably move on to our guest, which is somebody that, despite the fact I've barely even been here, I did actually interview.

9:22I did do this a fair while ago, so there could be some historical inaccuracies around some of the facts. Who knows? Maybe things have changed. Maybe bike design has changed because today's guest is Cannondale's advanced projects engineer, Chris Dodman. Now, Chris has been working for Cannondale for the last three decades, but he's probably not a household name exactly, unless you're a massive fan of bicycle design, or if you're someone like Mario Cipollini or Peter Sagan, who will know exactly who Chris is, because Chris was the brains behind those glorious red Seiko Cannondale aluminium cad bikes of the 1990s that Chippo rode, and those really lurid green cobble-bashing synapses in the 2010s that Sagan rode.

10:05So to put it another way, Chris kind of pioneered aluminium in the days where everything was steel and made that a race bike material. And he pretty much invented the endurance category, which, you know, who said all road? Chris invented endurance. And he also invented the press fit BB30. And mechanics have been screaming and gnashing their teeth ever since. But let's face it, it spawned loads of other BB standards and we won't even go there because that is even too niche for this podcast. But Chris has loads of patents. He has an incredible encyclopedic knowledge of cycling and bicycle design.

10:36And most recently, he spearheaded the engineering team for the CAD14, which is the latest update to those Cannondale aluminium bikes, which I've got to say, I haven't ridden one. I've just looked at it, and that's all you really need to know about a bike. Do you like how it looks? And I say yes, because I do love a horizontal chop tube. And I genuinely say, I'm not trying to be flipping here, I genuinely say it's one of the cleanest looking bikes I've seen for absolutely ages. just nice tubes really well balanced and with a 1x group set on it it looks incredibly slick so check out CAD14 hopefully we'll get them in the mag at some point to test so check it out at Cyclist and also cyclist.co.uk for when the review comes live but in the meantime just let me tell you a little bit about what we talked about today so Chris tells us about the potted history of Cannondale from private jets to failed motorcycle projects to the fabled Volvo Cannondale mountain bike team which some people may remember will, maybe not, but Martin Ashton.

11:31He was a kind of spinoff during his trials and tricks and Tinker Suarez names maybe ring a bell. We also talk about the difficulty of designing bikes, which let's face it, really simple machine. How do you improve on such simplicity? The difficulty as well of convincing Mario Cipollini to go to aluminium and onto American made bikes after only really riding Italian steel. Also what Chris thinks about car makers doing bikes, the smoke and mirrors behind things like graphene and carbon nanotubes, and why the derailleur was probably dreamed up by two guys in a pub. You look at a derailleur, a rear derailleur, basic as hell, but somehow it just epitomizes the essence of great bike design, thinks Chris.

12:08And I tend to agree. So without further ado, let's welcome Chris Doblin to the show.

12:20looking at Cannondale as a kind of a business that I've known or a bike brand that I've came to as a mountain biker back in my teenage years and obviously we're talking we're going to be talking about Cannondale through the lens of road cycling but you've been with the business for that long that you'll have seen it all not quite as long as 1971 which I think is the year when um Joe Montgomery founded Cannondale but in the most potted kind of way can you kind of talk me through a bit of your story a bit of your career and what you have seen and worked on through those years how you've seen the Cannondale business develop to where it is today yeah so um I was born in 1971 one as well actually but was brought up got into bikes cycling racing cyclocross in the surrey area belonged to a cycling club and uh tinkering with people with bikes making like what's embracing equipment playing around with frames stuff like that and then went through technical college and university still with a passion for bikes.

13:28And, um, it was after a few years off chasing girls with cars, I got back into mountain bikes. And then after university, Middleburn was just kind of starting up and I had an idea. That's the crank company. Yeah. UK crank company based in Hampshire. And, um, I needed a set of cranks, had an idea for something and got chatting to them and, uh, did some testing for them. We designed the cranks went down and sold them the design and said well look i design anything you want but why don't you give me a job rather than me working up in scotland and coming down here so landed myself a job in the bike industry and then i saw 96 the new xdr group set came out and it was so like light years ahead of everything i'm like this aftermarket business is not going to keep growing the way it is, I need to find something new.

14:24So I made a list of all the bike companies in the world that I'd want to work for and prioritised them, and Candell was top of the list. So I got my resume together, going off to Eurobike, went round chatting to people and handing out envelopes, and the Candell team was super enthusiastic, really approachable, open, excited about hiring people. A lot of the other booths, they're like, oh, yeah, leave your letter here, off you go. like not interested at all so basically called them every week for several months and then they said okay i'll give you an interview flew me to new york which was like amazing wow yeah yeah i got picked up by limo at the airport and like taken to a nice hotel and managed to talk myself into a job with them so i started in 97 which was peak volvo canadale era with the fulcrums and all sorts of stuff.

15:20We had the factory in Pennsylvania. Joe Montgomery had his private jet. If you need to go to the factory, you put a name on the list, you'd fly down on the private jet in the morning, fly back in the evening. It was like crazy. And Cannondale had invested heavily in the state-of-the-art computer software for designing, three parametric CAD. But to run that, you need to run it on a Silicon Graphics workstation, which in today's money to$35 ,000 for the computer. And then the software is like almost as much a gain. So like Ford were running two shifts on their design department to be able to justify it.

16:00So we had six or seven computers and software and 11 engineers. Like the software was so expensive, you could only get these workstations in the US. That's how they developed the laser cut Tad and Slut technology using lasers to cut the tubes, which meant make it clip together. And that basically was by investing so much in such cutting-edge software and hardware, we were able to create this manufacturing technology that didn't exist. And that allowed Cannondale to make basically any size bike you wanted overnight. And that allowed us to prototype fast and accelerate all the team frames, all custom.

16:42CAD 5 people maybe don't remember but we even had a custom program where you could put in all your information and you got a frame that was custom geometry and custom paint and color and graphics and it was all done automated system fired up at midnight generated the laser programs the guys picked up the files got the tubes laser cut them and it went through the production line and out came custom frame and you can't find anything on that because that was before the internet. So it was like stepping into a completely another dimension in terms of technology, like the stuff that the US had that wasn't available in the rest of the world.

17:24And is that where the CAD moniker derives from? So obviously it's C, normally you'd say Computer Aided Design, CAD, but it's CAD with a double A. What's the full unpacked acronym? and that was the first bike, the CAD5. So it's Cannondale Advanced Aluminium Design and the two days are nested so that it looks like CAD, like computer-aided design. So Cannondale's first bikes was the SD500, was an aluminium frame, and then they got into doing, that was a touring bike and then they did some road frames called the 3.0 and that was a racing frame and that had the unusual dropouts that were cantilevered kind of hanging off the back.

18:06Yeah, I remember, yeah. And that was actually extremely clever because, you know, if you want to make something stiffer, you make the triangle smaller. So by moving the seat stays forward to the front of the dropout, the rear triangle is smaller. So effectively, your chain stays in terms of that triangle, so you get a much stiffer back end. And then it also meant that you could make any size frame you wanted and not change the dropouts because usually when you connect the seat states at the dropouts and the angles change kind of have to make that transition nice so it was a really great compromise of like improving stiffness and having something unique and that was before the laser cut tab and slop technology came on so then we did the 2.8 frame that was lighter and that was the first frame that had the power pyramid down tube which was like this conical tube because back then there was a one inch steerer on the headset and the forks so the head tube was really small yeah but yet you have this big bottom bracket and so you need to connect the two it was actually technology that was used for making aluminium baseball bats oh right that made this like super conical tube and they also had the wall thickness varied along the length it was tapered it wasn't like double butted or plain gauge or whatever combination of those made for an amazing frame and that led after that to cad 3 which was the first frame for those cad 2 which was the more entry-level one with a straight down tube and cad 3 was like the premium one which the seiko guy started riding and that was really the the start of the cad series where things just accelerated that for a long time we were putting out a new frame every year which now it's like two to three years.

19:56Yeah, but then it was like every year, a new frame, new technology. So in 97, I think, was the year when you guys started sponsoring Cannadale, started sponsoring Seiko. So Mario Cipollini's team, as was, and I think they were on steel Moser bikes before, and if you looked at the Peloton, a lot of the Peloton was still riding steel frames. You guys come along, and you give an aluminium frame to a dyed-in-the-wool Italian sprinter from an Italian team sponsored by an Italian coffee company used to be sponsored by one of Italy's greats. Am I right in thinking, initially, Chippo kind of turned his nose up at that bike?

20:34In principle, yeah. The guy was amazingly powerful. And once he rode it and realized the performance he got from the incredible stiffness and power transfer of that frame, just like, okay, no looking back. Like, this is game changing. And so if the bike hadn't performed, then it would have been a tough sell. But due to the performance that the bike had, that sold all the riders on the bike. Because back then, you had guys riding bikes that often were made by someone they might know, like a smaller frame builder. And then they'd have the team livery on it. Was that a bit of a sea change for someone like Cipollini, who didn't necessarily see the value in a big company sponsoring him that maybe didn't do bespoke stuff?

21:24He wanted to have something that was very much made for him. Yeah, he was very individual and was a real showboater. The fact that with the laser-cut TAM slot technology, we could do any frame custom geometry didn't matter. Like with the parametric CAD, you go in, you want to change the seat tube blend from 52 to like 53.15 you just change number hit the button the cad model regenerates it would spit out the laser files you'd cut it you make the frame like every frame could be custom and so all the riders had custom frames and when they were made on the bottom bracket shell it's all engraved with their with the rider's name as the as the model number.

22:09And so if anyone ever buys a second hand like team bike, you know, it's a team bike, but it has the rider's name engraved in the bottom bracket. And so being able to do that, being like, hey, you know, we can do custom, like not a problem. And we did some very nice marketing around that with like Italian tailors fitting the suit and being like, oh yeah, nice imagery to go along with it. That's right. I think there's a famous advert from back in the day of Cipollini and a couple of others kind of striding proudly, almost like Reservoir Dog style, down the street in beautifully cut suits. And I think that in and of itself, and what you said earlier about the computers, speaks to a different time.

22:52I mean, I'm sure that technology, obviously, the way in which bikes are made, has moved on significantly in many ways. But I would imagine the scale and, I guess, probably the wealth of the company and companies in bikes has changed. And to do something similar now might not be possible. To invest the equivalent of that amount of manpower and money into a program like Cannondale's CAD programs and the supercomputers there, the silicon computers, would not be something that happens today in that kind of way, I would guess. Yeah, I mean, it was, Joe Montgomery didn't come from a cycling background.

23:31He was passionate about manufacturing and making innovative things. And he had an understanding of finance as well. And so being able to create these innovative products with Carindel and also being able to sell that to get the investment needed to be able to ramp up and develop these new technologies, that money was invested by investors because they saw the potential. So being able to get that amount of capital. And, you know, it's like tech startups these days, they're able to get that because they have such new innovative products. That's pretty hard to do in the bike world because for the outside world, bikes aren't new.

24:17But at that time, the bikes looked significantly different with its oversight tubes, and it was very easy to sell with benefits because it was a real visual differentiation and being able to show the application of the computers and show the fact that we had the best riders in the world in Italy racing on these. And it all carried along like we had the CNC machines, like Toto Magic cranks that we did in different colours. We had a whole cabinet full of red, blue, gold, depending on, okay, a steel day. Okay, yeah, we need to do a red, white and blue bike. We'll put some blue cranks on it. and custom paint the frame, like custom skin suit, because we made the clothing as well.

25:02All the clothing was stitched in the factory in Bedford, you know. So we could do everything overnight. Clothing, frame, CNC cranks, done, custom. Yeah. That was just another day. So what would you say, so CAD14 has just been released probably a month or so ago. How much has changed between that and, for example, those Seiko bikes? Did you say that would be a kind of CAD3 that, say, Cipollini was riding in the 90s? Because in a way, just looking at the silhouette like for like, they kind of look similar. I use that very loosely, kind of, but in a way that a carbon bike from 2000 looks very different potentially to a carbon bike now.

25:45Those two bikes, the 14 and the earlier ones, do sort of seem to have a very similar DNA, but what's changed? Well, the interesting thing is that when you design for aluminium, the material is fixed. So you design the shape and the wall thickness of the tubes. When you design for carbon, you design the shape first, and then you optimize the material to carry the load. So you can change the wall thickness any way you want on carbon. You can even have thick wall thickness on one side, thin wall thickness on another. Whereas on an aluminum frame, the wall thickness around the circumference of the tube is pretty much constant.

26:26It varies along the length, but like you're designing the shape of the frame to the material. And so as a basic, we got it right back in CAD3, and then we've kept optimizing and updating it. Whereas with carbon frames, they started off mimicking aluminum frames in terms of tube diameters, round tube proportions. And they've gradually evolved into what they are today. but the materials also allowed that. And so that's why going back to that classic shape for CAD-14 works so well, because you design the shape to suit the materials, which has always worked the way we did it. And so copying a carbon frame in aluminium, you don't get those benefits.

27:11Which seemed to happen a while ago, to a degree, and I say a while ago, I'm really sure I'm age now, maybe 10 or so years ago, is lots of hydroformed aluminium frames where, and correct me if I'm, you know, explain this better for me. This is going to be my layman's appreciation, but effectively pumping oil into a tube in order to change its shape. So kind of forcing it into a mould, almost a bit like carbon, but doing it with aluminium. And then you had like some quite strange shaped looking aluminium bikes, which presumably you guys don't really see the benefits of because are the ones the tubes on the cad 14 they just extruded as opposed to being hydroformed and them and they're more they're more uniform right they're not wild wacky bendy shapes that flare and and twist into other things so when hydroforming came in as a technology it was it was like okay well now you have the opportunity to make the shapes any shape you want yeah they don't just need to be basic so people like oh well great we'll hire a designer come in and design some tubes and they're like, okay, it doesn't have to be a straight line.

28:18Oh, let's style it. You know, it's like, okay, like, like we're going to make this style. We want to show that we can now do this. And it was a case of this new technology comes along. We want to really show what it can do. That's different to what's been done before in order to sell the technology. So you ended up with all these, like we did some tubes as well. They were like, like a helical twists on them and like really trying to show what the technology to do on the bad boy and like had these like fighter plane stealthy kind of look with hydroformed tubes we still use hydroforming but in tubes where it needs it and for example like the chainstays where now you have to fit the tubes round larger tires and between the chain rings you need to tightly control the shape and the bend of the chainstays which with a mechanical forming process where you just like bend or squash the tube you wouldn't have the control or accuracy to be able to do that without damaging the metal in the tube so we still use hydroforming but in a way where we make a tube shape that flows in the best structural form as opposed to it being styled that's been like elaborate so that's one thing we've been always evolving of using the right technology for the right tube to get the right shape.

29:39And then I know that you filed loads of patents, right, personally and with Cannondale over the years. So you've got lots of intellectual property in your name or with your name attached. How much of the kind of patenting and IP kind of process shapes what we end up with as consumers? Because sometimes, and these, I think, a lot of these stories are as much probably as much rumor as fact but you end up with i think a classic case in point was um sram wanting to do a road group set wanting to do something where a lever shifted the gears just like shimano sti but shimano has the patent on sti so you can't have two independent levers you have to have one so sram dreams up the double tap which at the time a lot of people kind of went this isn't as good as as shimano and it's now not something they have because they have, it's, you know, it's ETAP.

30:33But that was something where it was steered, perceptibly anyway, steered by IP and good design was curbed because someone else had done it. So someone else couldn't improve on it. They had to do something different. Is that something you run up against a lot in cycling where you think, I really want to do it like this. And then your, you know, patent department looks at stuff and goes, sorry, Chris, you're going to have to make it go this way and that way and put the little doofa over there. And you're like, well, it's just not as good as it could be. And they're like, well, if we want to make the product, that's what it's got to look like.

31:05Well, I'm the patent department as well, because I have experience with it. And using AI now, it's really helped a lot, because patents, you have to describe everything in words. And so AI is very good at filtering through and finding things word-related. So, yeah, it can block you, but also it makes you think. I'm like okay like Shram came up with a different solution which worked well and maybe it ended up being better you never know so for some things that take a lot of development having intellectual property is important so that you can get the money back for all the investment that you've done also sometimes people can copy things badly and something that doesn't work as well as what you did and give it a bad reputation so intellectual property sometimes controls that and says okay we're going to have ownership of this which means we can control and make sure the experience that the customer gets is up to the quality level and function level that we want so there are two sides of it you know it's like do you control it and also it depends you know canada's been through multiple different ownership over the years and some some owners they like to see you filing patents because it's like like the investors might want to see okay well they're developing technology whereas some other people or some other owners are like well no you know let's let's get the product out let's make it and let's innovate it and then let's do the next one and so it can block you the actual strategy behind how you play the game can vary depending on what you're making, what you want to do with it.

32:52In the pharmaceutical industry, they have, I think, this called a patent cliff, which is where you have control of something with a patent, and you have your money coming in because you have ownership of it, and then the patent runs out, and your revenue just drops off a patent cliff because everyone copies it, and you all get all these generic copies. And so you do see that in the bike industry, when all of a sudden now everyone has SDI levers. It's like, okay, well, the key pattern must have run out. So then it can really generate a spurt in innovation because now all these companies have been wanting to do this for a long time, can, and they're very excited and they put a lot of F into it.

33:34Did you know when you factor in things like health, travel time, and road maintenance, it's estimated it costs the economy around 15 pence per mile to drive but it actually benefits the economy. It doesn't just save, it pays back 25 pence per mile to cycle. It's one of the many reasons why Green Commute Initiative, or GCI to its friends, exists. It's a social enterprise with the simple goal of getting more people out of their cars and onto bicycles. And did you know Green Commute Initiative is the leading provider of the cycle to work scheme, where you can save between 28 and 47 % on the cost of a new bike through the government backed salary sacrifice scheme.

34:12And with GCI and Cycle to Work, you can buy any bike so long as the majority of its use is for commuting and work. That means you can shop for your new ride across 1 ,200 independent bike retailers, as well as at places like Canyon, Decathlon and Evans. You can then pay the bike off through your employer over three to 60 months, not much more than a cup of coffee a day. Your employer needs to be on board as payments will be made for your gross salary, but there's every chance they already are or would be happy to be, and the application for your new bike via GCI will be turned around in just a few hours.

34:45Or if you just want to hire, Cycle to Work can also be used to pay for subscriptions to bike share screens like Beryl, Santander, and Forest. Now, usually here I tell you about some limited time offer code, but Green Commute Initiative and the Cycle to Work scheme operates year-round. So visit greencommuteinitiative.uk or call 0203 740 18 36 today and get pedaling to work.

35:14It kind of pains me to admit this as a cyclist, but I rather like cars. And I think I've just been driving around in the nicest car I will ever, ever drive. And that's the Maserati Grakali, which it turns out is what happens if an Italian supercar company designed an SUV for people like me, for cyclists. Now, the Grakali is fast, like 0-60 in 4.1 seconds fast, but it is also, it's just delightful to sit in. It has the legroom of a first-class flight to Singapore. It's arguably more luxurious inside than my own house. And yet, I kind of can't believe I'm saying it because of what it is. It's a genuinely practical car.

35:51I could happily chuck a dirty bike in the back of it, then do the shopping, and then go and pick up the rest of the family. Now, I've been driving the electric Forgory version, which has the equivalent of a 557 brake horsepower dual electric motor with a 360 mile range, which sounds incredibly impressive, I know, but let's just put that in cycling terms, which we actually understand. That is the same power output as a thousand Tadej Pogacchas, all racing Milan San Remo at once, and then racing back again. Now, as well as the electric version, there are multiple engine options too, and prices start from£59 ,990, which, when you think about it, is something of a bargain, given Pogaccia's Tour de France-winning Colnago from last year sold at auction for£143 ,000.

36:38You could have bought two brand new Maserati Gicalis for that. Now, you can find out more and also find out where your local Maserati dealer is at maserati.com where else so that's maserati.com and check out the Maserati Gricali.

36:58And are there other technologies that you've seen and this came up in conversation with a colleague recently graphene which a couple of years ago suddenly everyone was talking about graphene and you had Vittoria saying hey our rims have got graphene in it and we had a company in the UK called Dassey, which was suggesting that, right, okay, now our frames weigh 700 grams, but give us six months and they're going to weigh half that. And something like that, was that just a classic case of Emperor's New Clothes? And is the bike industry kind of slightly susceptible to that? Or did it have legs? Is it happening behind the scenes?

37:34Are you guys about to bring out a graphene-infused CAD-15 in a few years? Well, it's interesting that you bring that that because like carbon nanotubes came out. That was a big thing. Like Joe, it was when Joe Montgomery was still running a company and he was like, it was on the front cover of like scientific America. And he's like, Hey guys, we need to make some bikes with these carbon nanotubes. And we're like, you know, they're like nano size and we're trying to be like, okay, Joe, well, we'll look into it. You know, how the hell we make bikes with these tubes, they're like tiny. And it turned out with composites.

38:10Well, yeah, you mix them in with the resin and increases the strength of the resin and has some improved properties which you maybe or maybe not can measure. I would joke with like the nano technology, they call it no-no technology because no one knows that there's nothing in there. That's just my being skeptical. Yeah, graphene, it's very hard to say how much it actually does affect things because like, I think you can mix in with the resin in composites and it supposedly increases the strength of them. I think we maybe did use one of those resins for one of the Evos. I think maybe Evo 1 we did.

38:56But yeah, it's things like when you buy clothing and it says titanium on there and it's a jacket. It's like, well, this jacket's not like, can you shoot me? Does the bullet go through? It's made of titanium. like well no it's sometimes there is some marketing or like scandium was another thing with aluminium frames yeah it was like came from russia used for shooting rockets through the polar ice cap added to aluminium frames to make some stronger yeah it's like the cool one if it gets people excited but as an engineer until i see the data in front of me i'm somewhat skeptical and as an engineer when you look at a bike and i often look at a bike and i think i love how simple they are every part of a bike by and large is sort of home user repairable with a bit of you know looking at an old bicycle book or internet trawling and then just the system of turning some legs turning a chain turning a wheel with some gears is just beautiful but then i you look a bit closer and you know you're around bikes a lot as an engineer and I'm around them from a kind of a viewer's point of view and there's always certain bits that feel like massive weak links to me you know something like a front mech seems like can we not design our way out of this this little thing and maybe even a rear mech it sticks out it could get whacked how many bikes have we all ridden where you just can't quite get the shifting right for love nor money are there bits of bike that you look at and you think that does just need a complete overhaul we need to move away from that we need to have one bottom bracket standard or stop having integrated bars or whatever it is i mean yeah i mean the derailleur it seems like a classic example as it's like and just imagine two guys in in the pub and being like oh i want to shift gears and like well just put another sprocket on the side we just push the chain off the side it'll fall on to the next one It'll be fine.

40:52I'm like, well, how about the other way? Just force it up there. Just push the chain across. It'll go on the next one. Where else is it going to go? It'll be fine. And it's like we made it in the shed. It worked. Okay, right. And now you have, like, 50 years of evolution. So, I mean, I worked a lot on chainrings and spending hundreds of hours working on the little twisted teeth and the shift-grunt profiles and developing spider rings that have better stiffness and light weight and all this kind of thing for hologram, which, yeah, you're taking this simple concept and optimizing it. Because sometimes the simplest way is the best, but there are things like going to one by and things like clutched trailers and the thick, thin, narrow, wide teeth on chain rings.

41:40Okay, well, those innovations really make the user experience better by stopping things going wrong. You know, it's like it doesn't improve the experience like 99 % of that time, but that 1 % of the time when things would go wrong and then it fixes them. Yeah, which I always find kind of crazy because the Tour de France, for example, is often paralleled with Formula 1 in terms of pinnacle of the sport, guys, athletes at the top of their game, and then the equipment is the best of the best. or extend that out to the World Tour calendar? And then how many times do we see a rider suffering a mechanical?

42:22And I think of like Mark Cavendish a couple of years ago when he was nearly going to break that Merck's record and then he slipped a chain in the sprint. And you just think, how can that be in this day and age? I know that Formula One cars, the engines blow up and the tyres explode and things fail. But also if the same thing happened over and over again and someone's head would roll. But in cycling, the number of chains that fall off that change the course of races blows my mind. Or punctures at Paris-Roubaix. I just think, are we not beyond the point where someone should puncture at Paris-Roubaix and that just changes their whole fortunes?

42:59It's the difference between winning and losing. I think it's all about, as a cyclist, you can feel the slightest difference and benefits to the performance of the bike. And so you're always trying to push to the limit on everything in terms of the best tyre pressure or the lightest tyres or the slickest drivetrain. And that leads to sometimes unforeseen consequences because if it's like, okay, no, we're going to play this really safe, we're going to put these 1 ,000-gram urban tyres on there, we're never going to have a puncture on Paris-Roubaix. You can run whatever pressure you want, you're going to be fine, but you don't get the performance.

43:39And so, yeah, it's like we had Hedgehog Road bikes on the podium at Paris-Roubaix, but then we built a motorcycle and went bankrupt. And then it's like, okay, well, we don't sell many of those. We're going to stop doing that. But you look at the bikes now for gravel and like front suspension, super light integrated carbon plate front suspension with electronic lockout, which we had in Paris-Roubaix, they had hidden lockout switches in the brake levers. Running a little motor in the head shock, you could switch it on and off without anyone seeing. In 2003, it's like exactly what we want, but that technology stopped.

44:21So sometimes technology that could improve things does stop, and then it takes a lot to bring it back. But yeah, it's pushing the limits all the time. That was just the Paris-Roubaix triggered that story. Because that's an interesting one for you guys, right? Because as I understand it, head shock. So anyone out there that doesn't know what we're talking about, it's a suspension cartridge unit that's in between the fork crown and the bottom of the head tube, as opposed to being in the fork legs. So you don't have stanchions and a classic suspension fork. You have, in a way, you know, there might be another American company out there that you look at and you think you've done something similar, specialized with the Diverge's future shock but it's it is different to that and that was born of you guys Cannondale that is saying we don't want to be beholden to RockShox or Manitou so the two big brands at the time in terms of having to source our suspension it's more economical for us if we can design our own that goes on our bikes and so that was a strange meeting of economics changing design in a way that maybe at the time a designer might have said, well, that's not the best solution to do that because the best solution is the RockShox fork over there that already exists and has 140mm of travel to R60.

45:39Was that how it kind of went? It was dissatisfaction with the amount of flex on... I mean, you look at any suspension fork that's launched, they're always talking about the stiffness and how they've tuned the flex and changed the axle and stanchion diameter. The early forks were really flexible. I remember riding the first RockShox and going into a corner and turning really hard and the bike went straight on and I went, because there was so much fork flex I wasn't used to. And bushing, sliding, friction. Like, okay, well, there's a better way to do this. The head shock runs on needle rollers, so everything's rolling.

46:17There's no friction. And there's no play. Nothing wears out. The original head shocks, you can keep on rebuilding them. None of the structural parts wear out. all the parts that you might want to replace. You can just keep rebuilding them 10, 20 times. It's a fault for life. So it was going into things with a different approach of saying, okay, we think we can make something better that is stiffer because that was one of Cannondale's, like, power grams of, like, building something stiff so it rides well and performs well. That's led to the head shock and that technology transferred into Lefty, which we still use today and won the World Cup championships.

46:55on. And a lefty is a single-sided fork, just the left fork, kind of fork leg, stanchion, whatever you want to call it. That blows my mind that you can have an axle that goes perpendicular into the dropout of a single-sided fork and somehow remain perfectly perpendicular. How on earth do you compensate for the fact that even on a micron level, there's gaps between things, and as you put weight on something that's only supported on one side, the other side would naturally go and bend up a bit. I'm not sure if that's something you can explain without a whiteboard behind you, but I always look at that design and think, my goodness, how does that work?

47:39Well, yeah, everything on a bike flexes. That's one thing that, like, when you look at most other things in the world, they don't flex, and like a train, you don't look down the train and see if the train's flexing. But in an airplane, like the airplane's wings flex a lot, and sometimes you'll be sitting in an airplane and you can see everything flexing and shaking. And bikes are the same. Everything flexes. Otherwise, it would be brutally uncomfortable. So it's all about engineering everything so that it can flex, but not enough that you notice it, or not enough that it affects the performance.

48:17And so that's where structural optimization and good computers and our test lab, which, you know, we were very early. That's one of the things that relating to CAD as well, we developed our own forks for the mountain bikes. You had the pepperoni forks, we had headshot, and that allowed us to, we built a test lab. We spent like one and a half million dollars in the early days building a state-of-the-art test lab none of the other companies had. We bought equipment they used to measure, flakes on the wings on aircraft and things like that. and use this so that we could engineer the performance and measure the flex on things and test things so they were safe.

48:57And we actually made the fork that was called the 2.8 fork, which was a road bike fork, on what's called the Sub 1 because it weighed under one pound. And it had a super oversized headset with an inch and a quarter headset just before we went to CAD 3, and it was just before fork blades started getting carbon. And it's really rare. You can hardly find them, but it was a classic example of Cannondale pushing the limits, building something that was oversized, stiffer, better, right before the cusp of carbon forks coming in. So going back to Lefty, it's all about knowing the limits and knowing what you can perceive.

49:35And I was involved in some of the early prototypes of that, like going for the first ride down a mountain on one of those. I think that was the third person to ride it, and it was quite unnerving. But we knew that we knew what we were doing, and 20-odd years later, it's still winning World Cups. So speaking of pushing those limits, specifically thinking about road bikes now, do you look at road bikes with wider clearances than other disc brakes, electronic gear is pretty much standard, power meters almost standard, integrated everything? Do you feel like we've reached kind of peak bike? Because it is a simple design, where else could it really go?

50:14I think it's interesting to look at the different riders and what they use the bikes for. Because, you know, if you look at CAD14, that can be the perfect bike for someone. Yeah, we can have like the Synapse, where it was our platform where we've really been able to like push the limits on things, like integrating SmartSense, where you have built-in lighting and a power pack for charging things and integrated storage. That suits a different customer. And so in some ways there was a long era. had ways of like making things lighter lighter lighter like when we did the cad we went cad 5 cad 6 had the bb30 hologram cranks cad 7 a lighter tube set but that got to the point where it was very light but it wasn't as stiff as we'd like and then we started making things stiffer again with cad 8 and cad 9 cad 10 and then change direction and then it's like okay we want to but disc brakes on there, doing the braze on chain state mount, developing the flat mount frame interface.

51:19And it's about improving performance in different ways for different customers. So, yeah, sometimes it goes from making things more minimal and then it comes to a time where you want to start adding things on like power meters or integrated lighting or even wider tires or fender compatibility. So, yeah, things have got more and more minimal in some areas and then you start adding other things that people need. So we might have reached peak minimalism and then from there, you know, it's like, then we start, we're always going to keep adding gears until we run out of space, I don't know, until you can't see the chain.

52:01And do you think bikes have, you know, beyond simple, well, it's not simple as economics, but beyond economics and inflation, have we reached a ceiling for the cost of bikes? And that leads into the kind of question I've asked quite a lot of bike designers. Why are bikes so expensive? Because at the top end, you've got, standardly most bike brands will have a£12 ,000 or, you know,$14 ,000 race bike or more. And once upon a time, that was the absolute upper limit for something that may have been very exotic and bespoke. And some artisan in a shed only made one and a half of them every seven years.

52:40Why are they so expensive? because the actual elements of them from, you know, kind of layman's perspective look quite similar. Well, for example, CAD14, Andy Kleiber worked on it. I was like, it's taken like five years to do CAD14. He had two kids during the space of the project. It was like that long. So sometimes to get things good enough to be better than the last one to where you want, it takes a lot, a lot, a lot of time and a lot of testing. like sometimes developing a frame you'll test hundreds of frames that don't do the test lab breaking a frame making new versions to get the data to get the bike to be where you want to be and then like okay nearly there not quite right you need to make new tooling make new tubes retest and so to get things to this peak level you know it was like 100 years of evolution 14 generations of CAD then it takes quite a bit of time and that obviously costs time and resources to to develop that but we feel the end product is more than worth it once you write it and certainly with all the other parts you know I think one reason why CAD has stayed cutting edge for so long is because every iteration we always integrate all the best interface standards and And it's not just the frames, the frame set.

54:08Like the fork, if you look up, we do a whole podcast on road bike forks and how they've evolved and how the changes have come and how that's impacted the frames and the bike industry and the standards of the headset diameters through axle, tyre clearance, putting disc brake mounts on, like asymmetric layups, delta steerer to allow the cables to run through the frame cleanly. It's not just the frame. Like when you look at CAD 13, it was a rim version and a disc version. Like CAD 12 had speed release, like a different quick release standard. Like each iteration has always got the best combination of the technologies to make the best bike at that point in time.

54:53So we always have to stay on top of that. And like CAD 14 having UDH, Universal Derailleur Hanger, that's now when we started the project five years ago, wasn't a thing. I'm like, okay, well, we need to change the project scope during this to make sure that when we come out with it, everything's up to date. Absolutely. Would you say, yeah, with UDH is an interesting one. Again, I've chatted with colleagues about this, and we kind of bounce around this idea that whoever invented UDH over at SRAM, so that's a universal derailleur hanger, which is the idea is that every bike shares the same derailleur hanger.

55:30You don't have to carry this mad inventory of different esoteric types if you're a shop. And if you're a consumer, you can find your replacement anywhere you want. And there are other benefits too. But the person who invented that SRAM, they're going to, you know, straight onto the board. They're made for life, right? Because what an amazing invention that everyone suddenly has to have. On some level, presumably, it's maybe, it might be open source, but there's probably some sort of licensing going on. And you also introduce this thing that in time pulls people towards your rear mechs, your drivetrains as well, because the SRAM rear mechs work best specifically with UDH for their full mount rear mechs.

56:08Do you sort of have a similar kind of appraisal? And is there, you know, to the victor of the spoils, if you could do something similar with a BB where suddenly that was the industry BB? Well, looking back, Cannondale derailleur hangers, they mounted on both sides like the full mount derailleur. And actually we had a patent on that for a derailleur hanger. So seeing the full mount deraillers happening now, it's like basically, okay, you've integrated the derailleur and the hanger with the same principles we've had like 20 years ago. So we completely believe in the principle and technology. Having one derailleur hanger standard makes complete sense because it doesn't make economic sense for having all these different versions.

56:53But yet no one was wanting to standardize it. and it was a great trojan horse for their universal derailleur hanger, like direct mount derailleur. So 10 out of 10 for strategy. They really had the long-term strategy and worked towards it and got everyone on board, which as an industry, it's not easy to get everyone aligned. So definitely hats off for strategy. We kind of did try and do the same thing with BB30 in the past, the bottom bracket interface. And yeah, that was somewhat harder to get the whole industry to stay with because manufacturing to tight tolerances is not easy and not everyone does it as well as others.

57:39So ultimately people have generally gone back towards a threaded bottom bracket where there's less precision needed in the manufacturing side. But still, again, it's another part of bikes that blow my mind. bottom brackets how routinely your brand new bike can end up creaking after not that many miles or a few too many rides in the rain does that occur to you when you kind of think come on come on bike industry we can do better than this because it's nothing more annoying than a creaking bike well it's funny you see the number of stuff on comments and forums about and i'm like if the internet had been around when everyone was riding square taper bottom brackets the forums would have been full of everyone complaining about creaking noises but it would also be bent bottom bracket spindles and the the crank arms rounding out and all the other problems that we had but we've forgotten about yeah so yeah going back to the aircraft analogy like bicycles are designed to be really light and that means they do flex and that is necessary to get something that's very lightweight and also compliant and comfortable.

58:50But then when you have things flexing, then it tends to draw water and grime and everything into the joints because you could make the bike a lot heavier and eliminate a lot of the flex. And there's a strong likelihood that it would be less prone to creaking, but you'd have a much heavier, less comfortable bike to ride. And so it's finding the right balance, the right greases and lubricants and the the right tolerances for everything. And again, people who wash their bikes too much, they wash all the grease out. And so often the quietest bikes are the ones that look the least maintained. I'm absolutely down with that.

59:32But yeah, just thinking about that, the water ingress and the dirt ingress just puts my mind to the kind of recent trend in gravel bikes for storage hatches. and so you've got your down tube you've got a little clicky bit of carbon comes out opens up the down tube you can stuff all manner of things in there put that cap back on and looking at those mechanisms what do you what do you see when you see those those sorts of things do you kind of think yeah great idea now but show me that bike in two years time because that thing is going to be rattling all over the place and will one day have moved away from this or do you think no great idea another great idea well executed by the bike industry so the key word there is execution you know you've got the idea and then you've got the execution and you can have a great idea with poor execution you can have a great idea with great execution and again going back to the test lab it's something where we do a ridiculous amount of testing testing all sorts of things like storage doors bottle cages things like that where you want to see how it performs yeah you can send people out and ride it and you can also build test machines to shake and rattle that thing with like fully loaded bottles attached and put it through all sorts of terrible conditions and make sure that it still performs and so i feel confident in our products that we've done the due diligence to test them both like you lachlan morton riding the fastest time round australia on new synapse just to test that.

1:01:10They're like, okay, well, there's harsh conditions. You've got all that dirt and dust and vibration and potholes. That's real-world testing to the limits, and then we back that up also with lab testing as well. So I can only vouch for the work we do. Hopefully not everyone can ride around Australia, but it would be nice. Nice, like, hey, boss, I'm off for a month. Yeah. What are some of the stranger tests that you guys put your gear through that people might not realize? And I've got in mind, I visited the Zeffel factory once, so French company that makes parts and accessories. And just around the back of their building was a tree.

1:01:50And in the tree were loads of bottle cages. And I asked the guy, what's that? And he said, well, we just leave them outside and we see what happens. Whether the UV changes the color, whether the temperature changes, meaning the plastic or the composite cracks. and you look at that and you think it seems so kind of basic but then how could you replicate that better than literally leave the thing outside for a while yeah you know talking years see what happens do you have similar sorts of things yeah i mean some of the best tests are very basic like we used to have a test for mountain bikes where it's just like yeah huck the flat off a loading dock like there's the loading dock you just ride off it and then And the next person rides off it and you just keep doing that.

1:02:32And then, well, yeah, you find out what breaks. We'll load up with a load of aircraft-grade instrumentation and gather all the data on all the stresses and strains and accelerations. But, yeah, then you can also look at the bike afterwards and see, well, okay, the frame's fine, the fork's fine, but all these other things are broken. But for, like, bottle cages, like we, our latest bottle cages we have with the, and computer mounts, like insane vibration testing and frequency measurement and just making sure that, yeah, you go and ride around Australia on all those rough cobbles and yeah, your computer mount's not going to break from the vibration from all the washboard roads and things like that.

1:03:15And your bottle's going to stay in the cage. So it's a humble thing like a bottle cage, but to do it right takes a lot of effort. I bet, yeah. And finally, if you, not necessarily absolute pipe dreams, obtainable pipe dreams, looking at bikes now and thinking about road bikes, and I'm talking, you know, world tour style road bikes, five and 10 years time, what would you hope to kind of see them doing? For example, would there be completely internal drivetrains? Where will the industry, do you think, go next in a, this is actually a feasible direction? Well, I think we have to think about sustainability, you know, of like if you look at, remember being at the, when we launched Hologram and BB30 with the Seiko team, I went, traveled with them for a week back in 2000 and they would wash the bikes down with diesel fuel because it got the bikes really clean.

1:04:14Yeah. And now we don't do that. We use sustainable degreases so that things are better. But things like, I know there's been a big push with the water bottles of having high degradable because they go through 20 ,000 bottles in the Tour de France. It's not cool, fast, and racy, but hey, we still want to have this planet in a decent shape so our kids can go ride bikes and not be suffering from pollution and stuff like that. So things like that are something that we're obviously working on. And there's a safety aspect as well. You know, we've seen cyclists having tragic crashes recently. So the element of electronics integration and tracking and making sure, airbags and things like that that are being pushed, like, okay, well, when I started racing, it was the bunch of bananas leather hairnet helmet.

1:05:10I didn't buy a proper helmet. It wasn't available until I left university. I'd been racing for years without a proper helmet. Now you wouldn't consider that. So I think keeping on with the safety equipment so that you can have crazy racing, hopefully without punctures and chains falling off and everyone's staying safe. And yeah, maybe there'll be more locally made frames with things like 3D printing now. being able to make things locally, custom sizing, small volume, the technology is going to allow that. So bikes will always get faster. Riders will get faster. I don't think that's going to change.

1:05:55But hopefully maybe they won't need a mechanic because the bikes will be so durable. The guy just turns up with his bike and it works for the whole 20 days of racing. You know, there's a concept. So, yeah, that's what I would hope for. I think people out there also would be like, hey, if I could ride my bike for a year and it wouldn't need any maintenance, and it would perform the same at the end of the year, it is at the start, then that would be an improvement, lower maintenance costs. And yeah, bikes will always get faster and riders will get faster, but it's taking away the negatives rather than improving the positives that I think is the opportunity.

1:06:30And the most important question to any self-respecting road cyclist, when will they make lighter bikes and will the UCI change its 6.8 kilo weight limit in the near future? What do you think from your industry chair? It's definitely possible to make lighter bikes. We've had lighter bikes in the past, but the question is when you ride them back to back with what we have now and the way it performs, would you want to ride the lighter bike? Because it's the combination of the compliance, the stiffness, the weight, the aerodynamics the bike looks beautiful you know when you walk in the garage it puts this one on your face UCI will maybe make the bikes lighter but then you'll have to wear an airbag which will improve safety and if you look at the science behind it the weight is the easiest thing to measure but now it's one of the lesser important things in terms of parameters yeah no fair enough well Chris thank you so much for for joining us really interesting chat and I kind of want to do a spin-off podcast like you just said earlier just about forks so maybe you can come back on and do a little condensed version of that how forks have changed the cycling industry forks and cranks yeah but it's been an absolute pleasure thank you it was great and look forward to talking again soon

1:08:01So Chris Dobbin, ladies and gentlemen, Will, I won't ask you what your favorite bottom bracket is, but I will say I found, I love it when people just talk about making stuff back in the day, and everything today, whether it's like the computer I'm looking at right now, my phone, I don't know, like the microphone I'm talking into, it's all so nicely, slickly made, and you kind of forget that once upon a time stuff was much clunkier, and the stuff behind it was mad. So like the computers Chris described then making the early CAD programs to make Cannondale CAD bikes, the idea that you've got like a$35 ,000 computer with software to match and it's run by like 11 men probably wearing like lab coats.

1:08:45It just blows my mind whereas now you could probably just design the same thing on your phone and like whatsapp it to China and then it will just turn up in a box a couple of days later. Yeah, it's like talking to cyclist editor Pete about the early days of magazines when you had to bomb across central London to, you know, everything on paper, no computers. Yeah, all your photographs, all your pages with cut out images, sellotape down that you then sort of scan and print out again. No, it's totally rad. Can you remember your first sort of upgrade from the humble quill pen and paper to something electronical?

1:09:21no see this is this is where I'll probably make you feel a bit old you will now I've asked the wrong question you've really you've dug yourself in it I don't remember pre-computer that's mad I remember having being on a very basic you know desktop job with you know your blue screen and all the little numbers and that and CFAX and things like that which is obviously TV not computer but I can't necessarily help you with that one I remember being very excited at getting a first PlayStation which is a bit after. I remember playing games on the computer and then being really slow. But I feel very privileged to be born in the second half of the 90s that I don't remember the pre-digital age.

1:10:01Well, do you reckon the ancient Mesopotamians had a similar conversation where the younger ones were like, I tell you what, it sounds mad, but I don't remember a time before the wheel and all the other Mesopotamians are like, what? Yeah. Do you remember? No, life without. But I often think, would there be similar conversations around the Industrial Revolution? or you won't be old enough to remember a life before smelted iron. Were those watershed moments or are we living at the watershed of all watershed moments, which has stretched out a couple of decades? I mean, it's a pretty big one. As watershed moments go, I feel like the world's changed quite significantly in my lifetime.

1:10:42Yeah. And as you would have heard me bang on about already, I have children. I now look at them and go, you'll always know AI. and there'll be something else in your lifetime maybe that comes along that does a sort of has an AI flip to your existence but how do you think AI is going to be viewed in terms of that realm do you think there will be an obviously pre and post AI memory like the internet and computers AI will somehow realise it's in its own interest to erase those memories so no there'll be no memories I still don't understand why more people aren't worried about what happens in Terminator like genuinely I know it was probably talked about on a few Reddit forums about 10 years ago when AI probably was actually happening and it hadn't really caught on mainstream.

1:11:27But it's bananas. Terminator, right? The machines gain sentience and they turn on their masters and it's a really good film. And everything about technology and robots and stuff over the last 100 years has been imagining that the robots are going to turn against humans and yet we've still plowed on and made them anyway. and everything about sci-fi basically predicts the future in one form or another sci-fi and the simpsons the two greatest tellers of the future exactly i may have talked to you about this before but um there's a book called player of games which is like an e and m banks i think it's e and m banks and they have like every couple of years all of the kind of galaxies or planets in all of the galaxies all get together and play the game which doesn't really necessarily have any kind of exposition of what it is but it's essentially like a massive inter-tournament that settles kind of intergalactic scores so everyone can go back to knowing their hierarchical place at the end of it.

1:12:23So it's kind of like instead of having war. It's like the World Cup. And you just look at like, it's the World Cup. It's literally the World Cup. Football is already the dominant sport, which I feel is another little funny thing popped into my head today on the radio when they were like, oh yeah, the World Cup, the most watched sporting event in the world. Try telling that to ASO, who will still give you some stat about how more people watch the Tour de France because maybe there's more fans lining the roadside than you can possibly count or ever check. Or it's on in every cafe in France or whatever it is.

1:12:50But yeah, it's the most dominant sport in the world. And then they're going to invite... Imagine 64 teams. Imagine how long that would last. Yeah, but it's not like it makes the knockout phase any longer. It would still start from the round of 32 because you just wouldn't have the third place teams going in. Going through. You'd just have more groups and just two teams going through. yes but scheduling matches might mean that they last longer because they might actually want to stack them up so you can't see them because you have to choose between games yeah but I took them all in the worst thing about international football is qualifiers yeah no one cares just let them all in we'll get them knocked out and I think enough group stages as well pure knockout yeah yeah yeah I just think just go straight to penalties every game five penalties each sudden death do it all in one day fantastic well well it's been a pleasure i've kept you too long you're a busy man go back and be busy and i will should i tell you what i'm doing yeah i'll tell you what i'm doing it's a little plug for other things that we do i'm proofreading cycling electric which is a system magazine cycling electric.com you can spell those two words i don't need to spell them out for you and it's about e-bikes and you can also buy it it's gonna be out in the shops in a couple of weeks and it's very good and there's loads and loads of e-bikes in there and it makes me it kind of makes me more excited about e-bikes than other bikes i'm not saying i'm not excited about other bikes but you look at an e-bike there's so much cool stuff going on on an e-bike i feel like it's one of those things because it's way earlier in the evolution of the e-bike rather than you're looking at most most months you're looking at road bikes and road bikes at a moment it's just such a slow progression now from bike to bike that e-bikes are changing so much from one to the next one that it could be a bit more interesting to keep track of at this point in time.

1:14:44Exactly. There is everything new under the e-bike sun. Long may it continue. Right. Okay. I did say I was going to let you go. I'm going to let you go. Yeah. Thank you very much, sir. Thank you. I'm saluting him in an acceptable manner for those of you that aren't watching this on YouTube because you can also watch this on YouTube. And RIP Kevin Keegan. Oh, and RIP Kevin Keegan. I told this to him earlier on. I stole this from another podcast, which is really great, called Top Flight Time Machine, which I also will plug for free. But they refer to him as the electric mouse, which is a fantastic description.

1:15:16Almost as good as Gordon Brown being referred to as a haunted oak by charlie um uh brooker charlie brooker blimey girl man if you stuck with us to get through that last 10 seconds god bless you we'll write to us and we will send you something uh or maybe write to us and just tell us to make it better and tighter and shorter because that's what most people think isn't it anyway right okay definitely um rip kev yeah go and watch some highlight reels of that exceptionally gifted football player. Better than Messi. Messi's a little B-I-T-C-H. He's a good one though, isn't he? He's a good football player.

1:15:55Yeah. No, but he carried on so badly in that final. He's like a kid in the playground. Anyway, didn't say it, so I can't be done. I just spelt it. And I wasn't trying to spell that word either. I was trying to spell something else. Are there any pictures of cyclists baptising other cyclists that are younger? No, because most people aren't allowed to touch other people's kids in the bath like that. It's weird, isn't it? So this is, remind me of the Spanish player's name, Yamal. Lamin Yamal. And his parents won a competition to go and meet players at Barca. And lo and behold, Messi was there, who had somehow let the photographer convince him to bath the baby of this couple, which then grew up.

1:16:37Baby Lamin. Baby Lamin, which then grew up to be the youngest player on the Spanish team and to provide us with the largest age gap between two adversaries in a World Cup final with Messi 39 and Lamin 19. So there you go, Messi pictured bathing this young boy. It's getting worse, isn't it? Right, definitely we should go.