It may seem like a given that the tires produced by overseas factories are exact replicas of the originals sent by the product designers, but differences in materials and processes directly alter the tires that actually spin on your wheels. Wheel Energy also helps Specialized vet different tire production factories and ensure that the tires sold to riders actually match the prototype.
When Specialized designs a new tire, they send models to various factories and ask the manufacturer to produce a sample. They take those samples and run them through Wheel Energy’s battery of tests to objectively judge the tires that can potentially be sold to the public. “Wheel Energy provides the resources to directly test our tires and tune the compounds for race tires. Let’s say we have a specific compound. We do the adhesion test and the rolling resistance tests [on multiple reference tires submitted by factories]. With these two tests, we can gauge the compound performance pretty well and decided which one to go with,” says Vorm Walde.