RichardCunningham

@trauty: Sam is a pro. He'll do a long interview if he has to, but out of respect, I minimized the number of questions and let the man choose the length of his answers. I admire his clarity. No guessing required.

@TerrapinBen: Yep!

@jemima, I understand that the costs of using engineered materials would result in higher priced tires, but if you add the price of an insert to the tire, it's already $160 USD - that's a lot of wiggle room to experiment with better options. The end result would probably be a less expensive hybrid fabric, because the vulcanizing step required to bond fabric to rubber dictates using materials that lend themselves to that process. My point is simpler: You have to try before you can succeed. A $500 racing only tire that succeeds is cheap when you are paying out upwards of two million dollars a year to get your racers and their equipment to survive a four minute decent. Dropping the price is the easy part.

Tubeless tires often pinch-flat hard enough to cut sidewalls beyond the sealant's ability to heal the casing..

UST was a great design but it failed because its creators believed that the tire's internal rubber liner was enough to seal the tubeless tire. For two years years, UST tire makers warned against using sealant, claiming that it would cause delamination of the rubber layers. UST's internal rubber sealing layer added weight, while offering no defense against pin-punctures, and, because rubber (butyl) is actually permeable to air, they leaked down. Retailers and OEM bike makers balked at UST because it soon became clear that liquid sealant was the key to tubeless success. Back yard inventor Stan Kositack's Notubes tubeless system proved otherwise - that almost any tire could be adapted to tubeless and seated on an ordinary rim, It was the turning point for tubeless that ultimately debunked the delamination story and produced a lighter weight, self-sealing system that retained air longer than tube type tires. We call it "tubeless ready" now. UST's lasting contribution is the rectangular bead seal and the insistence that UST rims conform to the UST bead profile and seat diameter - a superior system that WTB has adopted across its tubeless ready range. That's the long version.

@ThomDawson: The DH version of the HPP suspension has a short cage DH derailleur, so chain growth should be minimal..

@SintraFreeride: You don't get 100% of what you don't ask for. Applying pressure to bike makers to reduce the weight of their trail bikes is how it gets done.

...and Geometron before that. Whyte's been a rule breaker since day one. .