Kú Cycle Unveiled – The Heart of Triathlon – episode 4

Kú Cycle Unveiled – The Heart of Triathlon – episode 4
In episode 4 we delve into the captivating backstory of Kù Cycle. As viewers have witnessed the triumphs and challenges faced by Kù Cycle athletes in the first three episodes, Episode 4 turns the spotlight onto the genesis of the revolutionary company and the cutting-edge technology.
A cinematic journey back in time, exploring the early days of Kù Cycle and its visionary founders.

Central to the episode is the exploration of the TF1 and its remarkable technology that sets Kù Cycle apart from the rest of the industry. Discover how the TF1 came to life, when former Formula 1 engineer Richard McAinsh tells the story of how he spent every minute he had on a revolutionary rider-specific bike design he secretly perfectet for years.

To start a business a new business with a new product that’s highly Innovative that is very much like bunge jumping without a rope not maybe watched by the entire world but those people that were on the inside of the bike industry in Tron specifically they could start to

See that we want half ironment full ironment and so it was proof that the product was really working and not just through testing uh through a website or through marketing but I’m based on race results and race results tops [Applause] Everything this guy has made an assertive move this could be a race defining move 22 23 years old this is the race of his life yeah big change in my life I would say the vinfast Iron Man 70.3 world champion is Rico Bogan from Germany the C AR came

Certainly gave me speed on the bike for sure I’m able to ride it even faster minutes we all knew there was a lot of potential in last B boy as he biked so not only are they fighting both for the AG group 3539 they’re also fighting for the overall a Group your AG group world champion [Applause] yeah it was fantastic I think last did so well and I think it was a a really really good day third 45 seconds this is race day for Magda here Inu at the challenge event Magda third 2 minutes Third one minute you got to stay focused five minutes on number two seven on number Three the tf1 concept as Richard presented it to me as an idea and as a concept in January 2019 was something that yeah I thought there’s so many bik companies out there why do we need another bike company but while talking 5 minutes to Richard and for him to

Explain the fork in the front of the bike uh what later became the fast Fork technology it was just so radical it was just so kind of like out of this world that I was just like whoa hang on a fork that doesn’t have a stere tube the head

Tube that’s been taken away and flipped around and put between the rider arms I don’t think there would be many factories that will even be willing to produce this but once Richard explained the technology and the engineering and then backed it up with test data and simulations and computational fluid

Dynamics uh results that just showed that this was something really new and something that the bike industry and the Tron industry had not seen yet so it was really worth the the thinking and the exploring of this route then well um it didn’t take too much too long to really explore what

He had thought of over a 5year period uh I just felt this really has some major potential that could actually shake up the bike industry so Richard and I uh after we kind of like got in touch and I could really smell that uh Richard had had had done something very special and

It didn’t come out of nowhere he he had his his his history 50 years of history in Formula 1 if you have built race cars for the best drivers in the world for 15 years if you’ve been part of seven World Championship 91 Grand Prix wins with the

Likes of Mike Michael Schumaker or yoser stoer and you know that much about uh Carbon Composites about aerodynamics and when you have built tons of products that are used by many brand high-end brands in the market where Richard was working at 3T cying as a technical director you know he’s seen

The pitfalls the challenges uh we went to factories that were not really interested to build the cf1 because they felt the front of the bike was so complex so radical and also so dangerous from a production point of view um there’s never been been any doubt but we’ve had plenty of obstacles

But that’s when you look back that’s been part of the journey it’s been an exceptional experience and I would say everything that Richard set out at the beginning was really what happened and yeah then you go from strength to strength and you build real trust in each other as partners when I left

Ferrari and I I basically went as a consultant to offer my knowledge of of compsite material aerodynamics whatever was of interest from my experience in Formula 1 to other Industries when I was approached by an Italian component brand called 3T and they it was like you know

Can could you design as some some composite components for a bicycle I thought I’ve done Formula One how hard can it be and the the biggest the biggest challenge was a lot of the the indivi if if you imagine a handlebar is quite an intricate shape it’s incredibly structural because if a

Handlebar fails it’s no less dangerous for a rider 50 km an hour than a suspension failing on a Formula 1 car at 200 M hour the driver is generally very well protected the cyclist isn’t you know they’re separated from the road by lyas so the the structural and safety

Requirements were equally as high on the bicycle it was way more challenging than I anticipated with the arrogance of someone that’s come from Formula 1 but it was it was fun to adapt and then there were things that you could bring in and still have interu so there

Was a lot I I actually learned a lot of when people said oh it must be such a you know implying basically that it was a step down from Formula 1 to the bike industry if I just look at it from an engineer in challenge point of view it

Was it was not as easy as you might have Anticipated in February 2020 we took the very first cf1 to a velodrome in Germany where we worked with an AO and bike fitting company in Germany where we had the very first time the bike had never rolled on the parking lot I I wanted to get get a ride in on

The bike but there was no time and that’s how it goes in product development sometimes and so we went to this track and and I remember Richard’s face in a and also like really worried is this all going to work and it went around the track the first lap the

Second lap and then we took two days on the track and we collected data and it was incredible what happened there what we experienced there because suddenly the the there was Data produced CDA data that the whole team there were looking at that they were actually playing with

Their equipment to see this the equipment correctly measuring all the test data because the CDA was that low uh that technical team had just worked with a Kona Champion that they worked for a number of days to reduce his CDA and after three days of testing they

Reduced the CDA through changes on the bike apparel helmets and they brought it down to a point that they kind of like whispered to me they said where this athlete has just ended 3 days of testing that’s the very first that’s the same data the same level where you guys are

Testing right at the beginning no tuning nothing changed no helmet no apparel and right there in that moment I was like this is going to work and uh and I think that was a very proud moment but we still know there was a long way to go

The way that TT bikes or Tri bikes had developed was a very the focus had been on very low drag for the bike you wanted to you wanted a bike with a very low drag number so you could sell it to an athlete and then you had to make it then

They make it in three four five sizes and I think it was clear that you can you can do that and you can make the bike more and small and you get a very low drag but most of the drag is coming from the rider and what I felt was being

Missed was that if you instead of just making all the aerodynamic parts of making the frame very small trying to make the frame invisible so that 80% of the ride of the 20% that’s coming from the frame you try and make that you know you you reduced the the that value of that

20% was that you can get more out of trying to reduce the 80% right what I think the the the trend in TT bikes that has been going for you know 15 years to where we are now and what it means is they all look the

Same was that they were they were trying to get the frame really Compact and no one was actually using the air and saying we could actually maybe I’m pretty sure the drag of the tf-1 is higher than then than most of these other bikes if you put it in the win the

Drag would be higher but what we saw from the cfd was as soon as you put a rider on it we actually dropped the the drag of the rider when I got the results of the cfd for the tf1 to match the P5 sure the drag of the the bike parts was

Higher but the percentage gain we got by dropping the drag of the rider we up the drag of the bike by 2 or 3% but it’s 2 or 3% of a very small amount but we dropped the drag of the Rider by 3% that was 3% with the 80% of the overall and

That’s where we get by making and literally by making the air do some work and saying where where does the rider fit so the starting point was get rid of the bike and when you when you blank out the bike and you realize most people’s Arrow position within a quite a

Small envelope regardless of the size so if you if you take out the bike and you’ve got no idea of scale so you don’t actually know how big the rider is the AA of position is is is very very similar obviously and if you then say well where would I put aerodynamic

Surfaces if I wanted to improve the drag of this shape where would I put the aerodynamic surfaces you wouldn’t end up with a current TT bike hopefully you’d end up with something like the the tf1 so and and once you’ve done that so once you said right I’m going to put all the

Surfaces here and there’s there’s reason for you know the the the the down tube axes are splitter so if you look at the the the action of your knee your knee largely follows the down tube so the down tube is always acting as a splitter whereas if you look at a conventional

Bike you have the fork then the down tube then the big open triangle with a lot of turbulent and then the knees are thrashing around in that open section if we can if we can manipulate so it starts with the fork so there’s certain enabling technologies

That were were coming in while I was thinking this concept one was finally getting the acceptance of of Ries to go to dis brakes so it was clear that was going to come and that’s obviously the key one because once once you go to disc brakes you remove the design restriction

Of having to have the crown of the fork over the top of the wheel to fit the rim brake moving so I already thought if we could move the head tube up in between the rider’s arms that that can open up a a lot of access to do something with the

Flow at that point I wasn’t really sure what but you could do something with the flow if you had something over the top of the tire a bigger Gap over the top of the tire disc brakes it was clear then then that completely open because you

Didn’t need need a hole and a bridge for the you could get rid of any extra bridge over the top of the tire so that opened everything up and then then when you again say when you look at the rider in an arrow position and and the the

Path that their knee traces it was clear what we what we wanted to do with that flow was get the flow at the top of the fork as close to their knee as possible and and then have a speci you could get control of the flow right at the very

Front of the bike which is effectively what you’re trying to do with an F1 car you get control of the flow with the wing and with those side plates and from that moment on the air is working for you and you say right this is where you

Got to go some of you some of it’s going to go into the radiator ducts for cooling some of it goes underneath the car because an F1 car you’re trying to generate down Force some of it’s going into the brake ducks at the rear to to

Cool the rear brakes some of it’s got to go onto the rear wing to get the down for but A’s pretty stupid stuff and if you can tell it where to go and it’ll obey you you can really make it do some work so the idea was we we get control

Of the flow with the fork we say right we want you to go here and we want you to start to separate either either separate around the outside of the rider’s legs or actually go in between the rider’s legs and what we found was it’s actually slightly better to get the

Flow moving around the outside of the rider’s legs and then use the the wide down tube as a splitter between the knees so the bit that’s stirring stirring up all the trouble and making making a mess of what you’ve just got control of we can largely keep control

Of it as it goes down between the rider’s legs and hits the down so all the parts are position with with where the rider is in mind and their shapes with what part of the rider do we want them to work for us we want the air to

Go so we have the the little extensions the for where the a extensions go they’re they’re shaped and angled as well in order to kind of pick up there’s a lot of dirty air comes off the back of the arms of the rider so we try and get

Control of that working with that wide H just behind the fork there behind the RO times and get get that to work as it all goes so the whole idea is to is to get the air so it knows hey there’s a there’s a there’s a rider

Coming start to get out the way now I can tell you this the bike makes a difference um I know L Armstrong once wrote a book the uh it’s not about the bike I can tell you it is about the bike in Trav business um it’s about

Comfortability so on the bike I’ve never never felt so comfortable um and this was 102 km bike so it’s a little bit longer than 90k um and I felt super uh the last 20 days I could go like okay I’m now going to go harder even um if you lie down and

You tuck in you can actually feel how the you can hear the wind today was the wind was B off faces coming in and then if you lie down and uh you’re all tucked in and all um aerodynamic you can feel you are aerodynamic out there so you can

Feel slight 3 and never ever since doing this since 2017 running off the bike my legs immediately felt good so I didn’t like had no wobbly legs and it was a climing y course yeah so I ran off the bike felt smooth and um and I think

Important is like the full 21 case I felt good it wasn’t like oh I feel I want to cramp in the what so I want to feel I want to clamp in the glue or something so it does matter where where would you put the parts of the bike to

Make the athlete that body shape more aerodynamic rather than focusing on making an aerodynamic bike and this to to make that work with different size athletes is why we have to take the approach to build every bike according to every athlete’s bike fit for 20 years

Now uh bikes have been or for for donkey years that bikes have been sold like underwear small medium and large we have actually said we need to stop the fact that people buy a bike first and then get a bike fit but to change that around first get your bike

Fit well before you purchase Define all your biomechanics Define your aerodynamics on the bike your performance stability uh your bike handling skills get all of that done at a really high quality qualified cool bike fitter and then we start to build the bike underneath the at basically the concept

Ignores the industry Dogma if you like of Designing a very sleek and sexy low drag bike giving a nice colorway and then selling small medium and large to customers who then have to go and get themselves fitted to it and selling those bikes on the basis of a few

Professional Riders being paid to get big results the the nicest thing is to see that concept of of the aerodynamics working to improve individual athletes across such a broad range of individual athletes that have seen that success over the past two or three years we’ve been working with those athletes with

Cycle when we launched our business in 2019 we were very fortunate to have an angel investor who fully believed in us as a team in the product um and the process that we were implementing but somewhere in the very first few months the investor said don’t you you need a

Top quality big professional athlete I said well yeah we can uh talk to Jan frino he’s a great guy but you know give us a give us €250,000 and we can try and talk to young but young was already connected to Big Brands but I actually said I

Think for half of the money we can launch an entire different strategy which is don’t buy champions but build Champions and that’s a process that I’m quite fortunate and very grateful that I’ve experienced between 2007 2013 with the professional Tron team team TBB that’s where I really learned working of

Course with a with a phenomenal coach who had a lot of experience that when you can select talents when you can bring them in an environment where success is inevitable and that success leads to more successes you can actually take take young athletes provide them hope and opportunity through a journey

Where you guide them from becoming a faster age group athlete a winning age group athlete and to then take a very difficult Gap to turn take them from profession from age group amateur to a professional athlete that was really much more inspiring to both Richard and

Myself and that’s what really led to the next gen program so we never bought a very big professional name but instead took the slow route very difficult route to go bottom up and try if we can build Champions ourselves with Rico Bogan we can say that process went a lot

Faster than we could have ever imagined once we made a decision to not plow a lot of marketing dollars in getting a professional athlete to ride our bike we basically committed ourselves 100% to fast age groupers having a new technology but knowing ourself all the test data we were 100%

Convinced that we can take an age grouper from a top 10 position to a top five position or a top five position into a Podium or qualify for Kona or become a pro that’s the program we set out and we implemented it through a NextGen program where we literally

Invited some of the fastest age group males and females in across 10 countries to join this program uh to not get a free bike but to invest in the program and to then have a whole structure and process from uh picking up a bike to uh

Getting tuned to go to an aeroc Camp to support athletes in learning how much they could save by aerodynamics by looking at data by applying science to to the process that we we could really and result proven uh take at this to a whole new level and that’s so exciting

Just looking at the numbers so we’ve downloaded both both sets of data from both alpam mantis and the AOL laab and the suit was pretty good so we were repeating so we’ve repeated effectively three runs so we repeated run 36 we repeated run 36 as run 42 and we

Repeated run 42 but with the skin fit suit and we’re seeing between those three repeats we’re seeing about 7 to 10 watt difference with the suit rather than without yeah it’s correct that we measure uh wind but we yeah it’s seen as a Yore but it’s not actually technically

A y it’s a turbulence that we measure and the system is able to uh contribute and understand the how the wind is measured with the bike how the bike handles wind um but with par it’s is a very stable professional Rider uh that is very easy to repeatable repeatable

Testing and very consistent in his testing so it’s uh ideal when we’re using both Concepts both systems on the error testing on the track that we can precisely see any changes that we make in his position and it was in the beginning a little bit frustrating until

We managed to find the optimal cockpit setup and then once we stabilized that and physiologically also with his lact take and everything was stable uh then we looked at helmets and then ultimately the the full race setup with the with the skin fit race suit and yeah there

Was a lot of gains of adaptation you you he the uh experts and thanks to a lot of testing today um and adjustments on the cockpit um we saved 10 watts and with the skin fit um wait with the brand new one we saved another seven Watts so I’m

Really impressed about today and yeah looking forward to the next race we we we’ve always set up to be very transparent about our data what the bike actually does I’m I’m very reluctant to to make big claims that if I’m put put in a chair with lights and a camera that

I can’t back up with with data as an engineer you know that that’s everything and from from the very first test we did at a track in Germany with the first two prototype bikes the results there we we knew we had something very special and subsequent to that testing we did some

More obviously a lot of development testing but then when we started to work with individual athletes and and customers and we gave them the opportunity to experience what era testing and and product testing and development and giving them an experience that very few professional triathletes get to do in terms of of

Seeing their data and how small changes to to their position or to how they use the equipment that we’re we’re providing for them can benefit them and educating them on what that data means when they look at marketing BS they they can start to filter what’s true data from the

Marketing BS of other companies and then I hope then they see that what we’re what we’re showing and what we’re telling you about the performance of the tf1 is actually backed by that data and can be validated I think our our main target is that we have to be able

To measure an improvement outside it’s it’s very easy not so maybe not so easy dayto day but it’s actually quite a simple process to go to a wind tunnel and get very very precise results and and Tiny know the marginal gains is is is the common expression but if you

Can’t see those gains outside then it’s very unlikely that they make a significant benefit so we like to be we do all our testing outdoors and in in different weather conditions and we can be confident that an athlete is going to see an improvement from a particular

Modification or maybe a change of their clothing or their helmet but any upgrade or modification that we make if we can measure the gain outside in the conditions that they will race then we can be confident that they will see that gain on race day so we launched the next

Gen program late 2020 we selected our first I believe six or eight age group athletes a Dutch team a German NextGen team Marain theour was definitely a role model um in terms of adopting the program realizing what the bike meant for her performance uh we we can now say looking

Back that once she started to abort the tf1 that on a half Iron Man time she gained something like 10 15 minutes when she was doing her first Iron Man in Finland where she qualified for the Ironman in George World Championship she cut her from previous years Times by

Some 20 23 minutes so she qualified for St George I flew out to St George I felt something special could happen in St George Main’s a very committed athlete uh really good swimmer she would be in the front back now we knew she had a

Fast bike she has a mean mean run in her legs her parents were there for a few days before the race they managed everything in great detail we would sit in the car drive half of the bike ride look where the corners were they were really really well prepared well

Detailed uh we could share stories about team TBB and malain was ready and yeah to see her and that swim in the lake uh fly on the bike uh and On The Run where I was hanging out with the Paris we were making videos at the a stations to just

Experience what she went through there and to win that race the female Iron Man world champion age group overall with a gap of I believe 20 3 minutes or number two what an incredible achievement and for both Richard and me it was it was a breakthrough moment uh but it was at the

Same time also something we believed that this was the beginning of more and that more could be won and that slowly we could now grow towards the pro level and questioning oursel how long would it take before we can achieve this with a professional athlete and