#17 Matt Wragg: Formula Selva V, all the updates, how it differs from other forks and some sidenotes on mediawork

In this episode of the TESTPILOT Podcast, Matt Wragg from Formula will explain the latest update of their Selva Fork. The so called Selva V. You can head to our website and read the review already. 

Review Formula Selva V (English)

Test Formula Selva V (German)

But we not only talk about the improvement of this product. We also shed some light on the motivation of Formula to make products that differ from what is available in the market, their goal to provide more value on the overall delivered package the consumer receives, to create a reliable product for a long period of riding all the way to help out with spare parts for many years into the future, helping you enjoy your product for longer.

The Selva V. A product which wants to deliver for the set-and-forget-rider as well as the tuning enthusiast. 

Tune in to learn how Formula is setting their standards in the cycling industry with a commitment to quality and innovation.

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If you enjoyed this podcast and want to get nerdy you can subscribe and also download the episodes with Dave Weagle or Paul Aston. We also have German episodes about 3D printing in the bike industry with Christian Lengwenath from Gravity Components or Sacky from Bikeyoke. Until next time!

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Testpilot.bike – Your magazine for deep insights on product, bike culture and the two wheel industry.

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Transcript

Jens Staudt (00:01.12)
In this episode of the TestPilot Podcast, Matt Rack from Formula will explain the latest update to the Selva fork, the so-called Selva V. You can head to our website and read the review already. But we not only talk about the improvement of this product, we also shed some light on the motivation of Formula to make a product that differs from what is available in the market,Jens Staudt (00:01.12)
In this episode of the TestPilot Podcast, Matt Rack from Formula will explain the latest update to the Selva fork, the so-called Selva V. You can head to our website and read the review already. But we not only talk about the improvement of this product, we also shed some light on the motivation of Formula to make a product that differs from what is available in the market, their goal to provide more value on the overall delivery package the consumer receives, to create a reliable product for a long period of writing,

all the way to help out with spare parts for many years into the future, helping you enjoy your product for longer. Tune in to learn how Formula is setting their standards in the cycling industry with a commitment to quality and innovation.

Jens Staudt (00:46.924)
And I have Matt Wragg here from Formula. You have an update for me, right?

Yeah, we have a new four card, so yeah, exciting times for us.

So Formula is maybe not one of the major, major players. It's a little bit of boutique Italian bicycle product manufacturer. Put it this way.

I wouldn't say boutique. Boutique is high price. We want to try and be fair price, but yeah, is a bit different. I guess that is fair. But I think that's the point, right? If you want to fork works like Fox and Rock Sharks, well, there's two really obvious places to go and get a fork the works like Fox and Rock Sharks, right? What's the point of formula if we're not going to try and do something different?

Couple of years back, I was talking with Vittorio. Vittorio! Vittorio was, he was doing this video series of people out of the bike industry and he was visiting me, made a video about it and he took one quote out of it and he asked me if dual crown enduro forks will be a thing and I said yes and this was actually before the Belva launch and doing things a little bit differently, Formula has

Jens Staudt (02:01.27)
a double crown Enduro fork and Formula has a CTS system, which lets you as a consumer fine tune the damping characteristics of your fork. So there's many, many tiny solutions and ideas within Formula to make a product very useful to a user,

I Formula has been doing really interesting stuff. I I first rode the suspension 2014. I've been riding this stuff for 10 years now. And for me, it always bothered me that I was riding this stuff and I was having really good experiences, but then I wasn't seeing it in the media. I felt like with the quality materials, the brand could be doing more basically. Which is where I started talking with Richard, who is now our...

I'm gonna say sales magic for now because I'm not sure what the structure is but he's basically the top commercial guy in formula now.

But when the first silver had been introduced...

I believe it was 2018. The 35 has been around since like 2013, 2014. so the dampers rough, I the dampers, the dampers at least 10 years. mean, basically this fork we've sent you, that damper is a 10 year old design. You know, we haven't changed our damper in 10 years because, you know, I told the engineers and they're like every time they go back and they're like, well, it works. I mean, one of the things that I think

Matt Wragg (03:28.824)
probably wasn't made enough for the time is we were certainly one of the first brands to use a spherical bearing in the damper. We've had that for 10 years. And I think for me, that's a really important thing. think people talk about friction resistance a lot and it's important, but they tend to talk about it in a stat. If you're doing that on a dyno or in the car park, it only gives you so much information. It's only so much use. If you have the softest fork in the car park,

but it can't maintain that under load, is that useful?

We're talking about the new Selva.

B. Yes, if B-

Matt Wragg (04:10.186)
It's for Vald. Basically we have... I have to check what everyone else is using but I'm confident saying that none of the main players are using the same Vald design we are. We are... rather than using bypass ports, we're using a concentric bypass valve. Please don't ask them how that works. This is where you need the engineers. I mean, the thing that I think is really important to a guy like you and me...

is what does that mean if you're using a valve rather than the port? And the short answer is friction. Because if you have a bypass port in the wall of a... If you have a bypass port, every time the seal passes the bypass port, you create a small amount of friction. So therefore to live without friction, you have to use a bigger, thicker seal. And so by removing the bypass port, we can use a lighter seal on the piston head, which reduces the overall friction of the system.

Couple with that, we're using a floating piston head design. it's actually, the piston itself is controlled by two elastic mounts and there's about, think there's something like a millimeter and a half of float in that to allow the valve to balance. Because this actually, our valve action balances at full extension.

What are the key updates for the Selva V over the former version?

honestly that's the real heart of it is that air spring design. It's a much lower friction design than we were using previously and then we've also updated the lower, you know if you're going to do a lower well you're not going to just copy the old one like you may as well make it a bit better. So this one we've increased the height by about eight mils so basically the overall stack height

Matt Wragg (05:54.574)
is identical to Fox and Rock Shogs now, to be honest, 5mm difference I think it was. We've made it a little bit stiffer, we've got an integrated mudguard and we've got a 180 post mount.

mainly an update on the air side so you also got rid of the the coil supported negative spring?

We've not always, we do have a double airstring, we have the R airstring, we've had that for a while. And that was actually the objective for this fork is we, we still looked at the R airstring and if I'm honest, we just, weren't happy with it. I think in terms of out wide performance, that forks from maybe 2019 and in terms of performance, I still think it's a good airstring, I still think it stands up. The problem was that it's, it's how was it to live with the dual, the dual air design. The practical reality is when I was running that fork,

I was deflating, reinflating both chambers every ride to make sure the balance stayed consistent. From what I understand, that's not something that's unique to Formula. I think it's something that's inherent in dual chamber designs. It's, uh, I think it's hard to have stability. And so the first criteria for this ball, cause we wanted a single valve design, a single valve, all air design that was a lot more stable than the previous dual air design.

We might get a little bit carried away already, but can you maybe explain to the average customer what the regular setup process on a Formula Silver V looks like if you just pulled it out of the box?

Matt Wragg (07:20.642)
Honestly, I think for most people just put some air in and go and ride. Honestly, like, you know, we're going to go down the rabbit hole of tuning, but like we send that fork out with the gold CTS and the Neoplast. And I think I said it's like 70 to 80 % of our users use that. And it's just, it's just a nice, simple fork. It's comfortable. It's responsive. It's, all, I think it's all people need. The thing is going to be is like, what happens if you get there and you go, this doesn't feel quite enough for me, which

is where I am to be honest and I imagine where you'd be Jens, you I don't think a guy like you is gonna want quite, you you're gonna need a bit more, right?

I'm a heavy, so.

Yeah, but you know, it's I think yeah. So what I'd say is like, this is why I was trying to break it down into steps. Because if we have the five levels of vows and neopause, I think we can give you a really logical progression. So let's say you get on the fork with the goal, you get on the standard fork. I mean, you know, I really hope that you're just going to go, this is brilliant. We don't need to touch this. You know, that's the perfect scenario for us, right? But the reality is that some people are get and get on, then, you know, some are going to

The most likely thing they're going to say is I need bit more support in this, which is where I am. For me, the gold isn't enough to how I want to ride the bike. Now, one of the things we want to do with this is we want to actually move away from the compression adjusters because the thing that makes our fork is unique is the CTS. And the problem is if you're starting to use the compression adjuster, you tend to feel the compression adjuster more than you're going to feel the shims.

Matt Wragg (08:58.144)
It tends to be like an overwhelming experience. So if we forget the compression adjuster, what I would recommend is saying, well, if you get on the gold CTS and you say, I need some more, the next step would be the orange. If you get on the orange and say, I need some more, the next step would be the green and then the electric blue. And then we have the purple the other way, which is a fully aggressive valve, which is, I think it's about the limits of how light, you know, how light

Damping to you we could possibly make with this fork and I think the the blue for the electric the electric blue or the titanium I think it is now is Probably the hardest we can make so you have like the two extremes there but so we've got these are five major stops and For me, you know, I get to orange and I'm quite happy But if you say got to orange I went I need a little bit more We go to green and go I need a little bit less then the step there by

we'd recommend is actually go back down to the orange and start adding Neopass instead of using more using the compression adjuster because the compression adjuster it's quite, it's quite a, you know, it's quite a blunt instrument. So it, you know, it provides compression all the way through the stroke. Whereas using the Neopass, it doesn't actually affect the initial straight. And so you can then re you can really increase the mid stroke support while maintaining the same initial stroke performance.

which I think is quite unique to this system. don't think there's anything else like that out there at the moment. And it's a bit more of a pain in the ass. You have to open the fork and put the thing in. It's not the simplest thing. But I think one of the strong things with this is it's very hard to get lost. You've got five major way marks. If you're on the green CTS, you know that if you want to go lighter, you go for the orange. It's a very...

You you're always in balance, you're never going to get the LSC and the HSC out of balance.

Jens Staudt (10:54.734)
There are the NeoPos which are kind of foam tokens, volume spaces. We won't dive into the full detail of it. We may explain that in text, I guess. And you have a pretty good video from Formula where you see it in a transparent chamber, which is getting pressurized and you see the behavior of how it actually compresses under higher PSI, for instance.

I think one of the things that we ought to be more clear about is that the Neopost are consumables. They will break down in a certain time. If you use them for long enough, you'll need to change them. I'd have to double check with engineering. don't know if it's a year or two years, we'd say. yeah, because they're phone, they're consumables. But one of the things for me, I think it's really interesting compared to say TPU, volume space.

I'm still, we're making some TPU volume spacers now because people ask for them. You know, so, you know, our job is if someone's asking, we're going to make it for you. You know, it's, it's, we're a business. But my, my position actually is I don't think they're a great solution because they add friction at the seals. One of the things we have been working on with this fork is reducing friction. So to me, it seems a little bit counterintuitive to do all this work to make a low friction damper.

then put in a space that's going to deliberately increase the friction. think it's, I'd have to get Aiman to double check to explain the physics to me, but it's, I know, you know, I know there's definitely a frictional downside to the TPU spaces. Whereas the, the Neopost there isn't there, they don't increase friction at all. So that's, I think that's really quite a nice advantage. One of the things I've found with this tuning as well is like going to this set of values, I'm getting much more into like a more

I don't want to say linear, because it's not quite the right word, but a much more consistent level of progression through the cartridge. I for me, I think that's the big advantage set. I mean, I'm on the Orange CTS with one neopost in the air spring. And I feel like I've got a set up where the progression of both the damper and the air spring, they feel really matched together. And this is why I've not done much with the progressive stuff. It's in the past. I used to like really progressive, whereas going to this.

Matt Wragg (13:09.388)
Yeah, but having like fairly consistent and kind of match level support for the spring and the cartridge and then using a faster rebound to help it come back to you more gives a fork where you can use much more the travel because I mean, something I didn't realize at first that like, you know, if you make something really progressive, it's very hard to damp it because the damping in either the start and the end of the stroke is so different. So a consistent kind of consistent level of progression like this.

It feels like they're working much more in harmony, if that makes sense?

For the new fork, the old one was interesting because the recommendation PSI for the air chamber was only going up to 90 kilos. Is this increased now?

This was part of the reason for doing this because, you know, if you've got a coil negative spring, you know, it's a coil, so there's physically a hard limit to the riders that can support. And that's why we had the R air spring initially, but again, you know, I've talked about that. that's part of the thing with this. And one of the design criteria of this is that it can support a really high, a wide range of pressures. Yeah. mean, there's certain advantages of doing a simple design like the self-rested coil negative spring. It's a very robust product.

There are limits and we can't pretend they're not. So having a full air spring like this means a guy at 100 kilos, 120 kilos should still be able to find that setting where there's, mean, we work with a guy called Paul Shepherd for UK distribution and he's like a ex rugby fart playing cage fighting valleys lad from Wales. I'm always very nice to Paul, but the point is.

Jens Staudt (14:43.438)
Ha ha ha.

He says it in the clean, he can't ride that spring. That was one of the big things with this, to try and get something because it's not just big riders, it's lighter riders as well. I think if you get down to 50-55 kilos kind of thing, you're going to find the same kind of issues that just isn't the range and the coil negatives.

What kind of travels are available for this fork?

We're launching at 160, 170 at 80s as the native spring lanes. I think we need to do 140 and 150 at some point. it just depends on what people ask us for, to be honest. Part of the decision is we actually wanted to launch this as a Mendeiro fork because for us, is what, yeah, mean, this is again, one of the things about doing it differently. This is a fork for us and where we ride. I mean, I live here in the south of France, so the trails are long.

and they're rocky and they're very technical. For those kinds of trails, want the two most important criteria are comfort and precision. And I think for me, that's what we've really hit with this for. me, mean, when we talk, I guess we're getting into 38 versus 35 here, right? And whatever, I think it's good. I think, you know, we have, you know,

Jens Staudt (15:56.718)
Thumbpoint?

Matt Wragg (16:03.094)
We're not going to persuade everyone. A lot of people are really happy with 38mm forks and we're not trying to say you're wrong. It's not saying, again, because we're not trying to make a fork for a million people, we're trying to make a fork for how we want to ride and how we want to do things. We're very convinced with the way they do this. I for me, I don't know if I'd go back to a 38mm chassis now, no matter which plan I rode for.

I you know, I talked to our sales manager, Richard, and he's about the same weight as you. He's 90 odd kilos. And he's, you know, he grew up racing with guys like Loic Bruni. So he's, he doesn't hang around, shall we say, you know, he's riding this fork of 180 mil on a full power e-bike, full chat. And when he starts taking the technical package and working out where we've done the things that on the long descents. the precision, I think that's the most important when we talk about stiffness.

For me, that's the most important metric because, how much stiffness do you need on your bike? It's, you know, who can tell you? Do you need 30 % more or 10 % more or 15 %? I don't know.

We saw that in with carbon wheels to bring a different example and they increase the stiffness over the top, which resulted in a bad riding experience. You lost grip, you lost comfort and the same goes for a 38 fork. And I mean, I'm a heavy rider and I'm not always down to having a 38 mil stanchions on my fork. think there is somewhat of a comfort and you may call it flex and you have an increase in grip as well.

Let's go back to the essentials here. Let's go, okay, well, how much stiffness in a fork do you need? How much is the essential stiffness? And the essential stiffness actually is, can you place the front wheel where you want it every single time? If you start getting noobly steering, if you can't place the front wheel, that fork is not stiffen it. But this is the thing. So at some point, we left this point so far behind that we've

Matt Wragg (18:07.51)
And then you start getting, well, how much chassis flex do you want? Well, that's preference. Getting the wheel in the right place is primitive. How much chassis flex you want, that's preference. But also we come back to the spherical damper as well, the spherical bearing on the damper. If you've got a more consistent response through the strobe, no one really talked about how much does the binding of a damper and the lateral load affect the steering performance? And so if you've got a damper that doesn't bind under load as much,

How much stiffness do you need? mean, it was always one of the things that no one talked about with the 38s. was one of the big advantages is the stiffer chassis means less lateral load for the damper. And I can't quantify for this for you. This, you know, it's one of those things it's very hard to kind of say, well, this is black and this is white. You know, it's more my experience is that certainly I'm 70 kilos. I like to think I'm a good weight and I'm riding on a full power e-bike.

I'm very confident in the feeling I have of the front wheel on my bike. that's probably the, you know, how much more can I say really? You know, and yeah, then there is the element of comfort as well though, cause it's, you know, if you're going through long, you know, I mean, my favorite trail goes from 1200 meters to 700 meters in what one descent and it's, you know, it's all, it's all rocking yield trails. And for that actually, I don't want the big heavy chassis. find, you know, the bent, you know, I

The difference of having a 35 mil Shastian having a bit more compliance over that kind of distance for me is massive. And so when we talk about the precision, you know, how precise can you be if you can't feel your hands?

Also, if you're looking into the trend and everybody is now catching on with upside down forks, I mean, they won't be anywhere near stiffness wise as a 38 right side up. If you want to put it this way.

Matt Wragg (19:56.268)
I'd love to them because they look cool as hell. One of the things we've tried to focus on with this fork is price. One of things we do that with is by not going in too many different directions. To make a really good USD fork is expensive.

You also put a sticker in your box saying, we promise you 10 years of spare parts.

I mean, that honestly came from visiting the factory formula. There's a room, if you go downstairs through on the bottom floor on the right hand side of the building, there's a room at the back of the building where they've just got a wall of drawers. And I was looking at this, it's like, what's that? Oh, you know, we have every part of every product we've ever made. I mean, it's probably not quite that. mean, one of the reasons we put a time limit on how far back it goes, I think it was 2019 and older.

that then means it's the Selva, the Mod, the Cura 4, the Cura and we 100 % know, you know, those we will say yes we 100 % have those parts. If you have an old one break of a 35 fork or some of the older stuff we probably have the

But it's a nice thing to have. And some manufacturers, just like come up with new stuff and then ask you to toss out old stuff if you need a replacement part and you could just repair it. I mean, it's nice to be able to repair it.

Matt Wragg (21:05.409)
Isn't that just a normal thing to do?

Matt Wragg (21:17.836)
You know, it's questions about where the market is, because this is where we'd like to focus on formics. I think the strength of Formula, the real strength is they're great products to live with. You know, I've spent 10 years living with them and I think they're great products to live with. Yeah, my wife will say the Formula forks will always have faible to work on. The brakes, it's little things like both the bleed valves on the brakes are threaded. And for me, that makes a big difference to me that it's really good stuff to live with. also the problem is...

We're not telling you we'll buy a new fork in two years. that's commercially, that makes it more difficult for us. As a small manufacturer, we're not selling the large volumes. We're not saying you have to change next year. I think it's the big challenge for us to try and work out where we fit in the market at the moment. Because I think so much of the market is very much focused on the ultra high end and the most shiny sighting stuff. And that's not really what we do. We want to make...

You we want to make simple, reliable, high performance products. You know, it's at a fair price. That's what it's just trying to find. How do we connect that with people? There's honestly the question is, is that even what people want today? We believe in this. We, know, you, come into meet the team, you know, most people have formula because they like the products. They like the companies, you know, you, untold to formula owners. They tell, know, people had a go, a lot of formula owners, they'll tend to stick with us for multiple years and multiple products. It's, know, it's just.

It's that initial step to get someone into formula. you know, honestly, of the big questions to us in the next two to five years is, is this actually what the market wants? Does the market want what we're giving? Like, you know, for me, what I want is a fork that's a fair price, that works well and keeps working. And that's what I think we're doing.

Well, what I really like about Formula is now with the CTS and you have a product which is fairly easy in setting it up. And then if you are down to like really getting the last percentage out of it, you have the option to go into that. And you not only have the option in the fork, but also at the shock. So there's a broad spectrum you can have and get performance wise from a Formula product in a Formula suspension. Front and rear.

Matt Wragg (23:34.028)
It's the things where you start to understand the realities of the markets these days. You can have an idea that you know is right, you are certain is right, but the question is, does it connect with the public? Does it connect with the modern ways of marketing, the modern ways of selling? And I believe we can. I don't see a reason why we shouldn't be able to do it, but I think we also need to stay open to the possibility that...

I mean, I'm not sure if and when you'll see an electronic product from Formula. To me, that doesn't concern me. I have very little interest in electronic suspension. And I really hope there's people out there like me who don't want that on the bike. You want the simplicity, you want the controls, you know. And I really hope there were people out there like that. know, and I need people and I see people, but it's the one thing you start to learn when, I mean, it's the interesting thing coming from journalism to working in-house is...

You start to, don't know, it's frustrating at times I guess, because sometimes the best idea in the world can be a complete commercial failure. And that's, know, we all know examples of this. I'm just worried I'm going a bit negative here, but it's... The thing is that's what you realise is maybe that's not enough. I'm convinced that, you know, for me like feeling that was enough. Feeling that riding sensation, like I want to keep this fork, I'm happy. Can we connect that to the public? Is that... I don't know. I don't, you we don't...

No worries.

Jens Staudt (24:57.568)
Is there a way to actually for a consumer who hop on the product before buying it? Is there somewhat of a demo program?

You know, I can tell you the demo program would be a great thing, but the question is like, what's the commercial reality for a company like Formula One? You know, and that's actually what it often comes down to is like, well, what do we need to do today? And the honest reality, the honest truth is that some of these, you know, there's so many things you could do, so many things you could try, but you end up having to be really focused because yeah, you know, you have to try and make the things in front of you work before you try the next thing.

And you know, we're such a small team, know, the formulas, you know, there's some administrators and there's the factory and all that behind me, but there's the big factory behind me. You actually start looking this fall for instance, there's Lucas, the engineer, Giancarlo is the head of engineer. San Francesco is the head of engineering. think San Welle, so you maybe got four people on the engineering side who've involved primarily Luca though. Then you've got myself and Simmel marketing, Richard in sales, Eamon.

and Baptiste in commercial and then 12 people. It's not a lot of people to do a lot of jobs. It's one of the challenges with a small company. It's like, do you find ways to take the risk? I think it's one of exciting times of my job is because we don't have the resource to go, well, let's just do a 50,000 euro video.

And yeah, have it, have it from the front page of every major website. We can't, we physically can't do that. And so we have to try and find a way to use the resources we have in the most efficient way possible. And, and that is Formula is an Italian engineering company. And I started thinking, well, how do we show this? And it's, it's not doing videos. It's making products. It's explaining them. It's trying to help people. I think we've made good progress in the last couple of years, and I think there's a lot more to do. And I'm just.

Matt Wragg (26:58.254)
I just really hope people like this fork because I think it's a good one. really do. I've spent a lot of time on this fork and I really like this fork, but also know that just because I like it and I'm impressed doesn't mean it's going to connect when it gets out there. I actually think journalists would do the job better if they understood that fear from this side of what it means to someone. You and I, Jans, we've both written back.

written bad reviews about things in the times because it's the job. now with this experience on the other side, understand now that, because you don't really think about the investment that's the investment that goes into it. I've been writing this forks for a year. We've been taught, the launch has been going around for six months. It's been in development for two or three years. It's so much work goes into something like this. And then you send it to a journalist and if you get a good one.

It's great if you get a bad one and they just go, this is garbage. You that's two, three years of, and it's, you know, you can't control it. It's the chaos. mean, one of the things that they asked about strategy in this is should we even still talk to journalists? And I think you have to, I think you have to accept the chaos that you're not necessarily going to get the results you want. Cause that's how you build, the reviews help people build confidence.

But it's scary and it's emotional and it's upsetting, you know, from this side, the amount of emotion that goes into a launch. I find it really surprising. Yeah.

It's a good thing to explain that we also at Testpilot, we're trying to give the readers or AKA consumers the possibility to test the product. So while the product now is out there and had been launched and you can read about it, you should also take on the possibility to test ride it. And we are doing like what we call co-pilot. So you can reach out to us and then actually get on the product.

Jens Staudt (29:01.056)
and we help you set it up and then you get to experience and then you can actually verify what we found in our testing process about the product and see if we were right or not.

That's very, I like, that's cool. That's very cool. This is what I like about your project. And honestly, since you've told about it, I've told a few people about what you're doing. I'm genuinely very impressed because when I talk, you know, and when we're talking about media models, you know, I think what you're doing is interesting because you've understood where the value is and what you can do and who, you know, where, the value is for. So I think this is one of the, maybe the things, you know, with a lot of the models we see for journalism today, the emphasis of paying goes to the consumer.

Whereas the value for what's been happening is more with the industry. But I mean, one of the disconnects for me, for instance, is I don't think, yeah, I'm not a fan of above the line advertising. Personally, for me, I don't, I've never been convinced to be. I think if you've got a big and broad marketing budget, it's worth having it there. But for someone like us at Formula, where we're limited resources and focus and effectivity, I'm yet to see data that convinces me that it's a solid investment to a company like S.

And so the problem is the company's coming to us and say, well, yeah, the site's going to say, well, will you invest in some advertising? No, because I don't see any value. And it was, you know, and I actually tried to talk to another site before this and look, I'm not interested in advert, but I'd like to support your guys. Can you make me a proposal about how we can do this? So I don't care about that. I don't particularly care about banner adverts on your site. And certainly I do not want to see, I never want to see formulas logo on a popup advert in the middle of the page.

the reader's experience.

Matt Wragg (30:40.17)
Or the YouTube interstitial things like when did YouTube start putting them on every three minutes? You know, I think, this is one of big questions of marketing now that we touched on the last discussion. Right. Yeah. There's a lot of questions about where's the value and how do you connect with people? And what you say about like demo centers. I think that's the next big phase for us at Formula. I think, you know, I don't know how we do it yet and I don't know how we do it with the resources, but how do we go out and start making that connection? How do we get people on the floor that help,

There's practical things like, you know, we have a bunch of good distributors, but the problem is if you go and say to the distributor, can I have the full email list of your shops? You know, that's not such an easy discussion to have. That becomes political and commercial. It's actually, you know, you start finding that like these things that you thought were going to be really simple, you know, you have this idea that let's, you know, let's do them, you know, do this. And suddenly you start going through the practical steps and you're like,

I think it's going be an interesting question for a company of formula size about how can we do that and how do we invest our resources? I would say if I had money in my pocket, I had budget today, I would be going to try and meet people rather than putting it above the line advertising. That would definitely be the way. think technology is going to offer some different things for this. How can we use social media, video? How can we make ourselves available online? those are some of it. I think it's going to be some of the questions for me personally.

Because, you know, I'm here talking to you today because, you know, we had some chats in Formula and we thought I was probably the best person to come and talk to you. I've been the one doing a lot of work on this testing and tuning and development and connecting it to the communication and the market and all that. so this is kind of a new, this is a new phase. Yeah. Talking to you today maybe signifies the start of a new phase in my career. Well, I can talk to journalists, but why aren't I talking, you know, why am I not talking to shops and the general public?

You know, how do we do that? What would that look like? What would that be useful to you then? And it's, there's a lot of questions and so, you know, we want to take a time and try and do it the right way. But I, I definitely think the long-term future of communications is going to be getting close, is going to be getting closer to our users rather than to the media.

Jens Staudt (32:54.79)
forward to be helpful in regards of with getting people on the product and I hope people will actually take that opportunity and then we can work from there.

I think there's a certain amount of inertia around people. People are used to a fork working a certain way, which is why I think it's good that you can just take the fork out of the box and go. I think that's really important. If you had to change a CTS or add Neopost to the first step, I think we failed. I don't think that's a quality you should have in the market. Where one of the journalists said, oh, well, I didn't want to use the CTS system. And so then he marked us down that a fork wasn't very adjustable. it's like, but you haven't used our adjustment system.

and you want to mark us down for adjustability and it's... To me that pose a lot of I think that pose a lot of interesting questions because how are people gonna be when they get this system? You know, what happens when you get the chaos that is the great public? You and I that do this for a living we might be really convinced for CTS but maybe if I, you know, if I go to finale tomorrow and speak to ten people they're gonna tell me to fuck off. So actually maybe what I need to go and do is go and speak to people in finale and understand why they're telling me to fuck off.

One big paradox on in the bike industry is people want to have the adjusters, all of them, and then they turn it exactly once. This same goes for geometry adjustments on the bike. Yeah. And it's just maybe a paradox on of the bike industry.

I think it's the disconnect between the comments and the reality of it. When I say about what commercial reality, ask what commercial reality we're facing. I think if you went and asked people, would you like a fork at a fair price that's good quality and high performance, they'll say yes. when you show them the formula fork with the CTS system, when you actually put in front of them, a lot of the time people will go back to the familiar or they'll try and use it like the familiar.

Matt Wragg (34:47.436)
and then it's not working quite the way you'd... and it's a challenge and it's the way we have to go at Formula. think, because honestly, if we do the same things as Fox, as RockShox, as Olims, as Cane Creek, as DVO, all these brands, I don't notice any of them putting out a bad fork right now. It's not like 10 years ago where this one worked and that one doesn't. Every fork is a good one.

You mentioned it before, you said it's an Italian engineering company. Yeah. And maybe this is a good summary. There are plenty of forks out there and there's no need for another me too product. So that's the reason why formula does things differently. And you have options like the Neopause and the CTS and you have, can use it in a different kind of way. And this should speak to a couple of people.

If we stop and talk to people and take the time, then they go, yes, you know, this is good. know, and that's, think it's the challenges, like, you know, where do you start with that process? Cause you know, practically it starts with one-to-one conversations, but it's then how many one-to-one conversations you physically have until you move on to the next step and how long those one-to-one take to net conversations takes to filter down the line. I don't think it's a secret that it's, it's tough for small businesses in the bike industry right now.

And I think every small business will agree out there that it's a race to try and make sure they can make those connections to be here for the longterm. that's what we're really focused on, like formulas. Yeah, it comes back to tele engineering company. It's a very conservative, it's quite a conservative company in many ways. It's a small family run company. I go there and I sit down with Andrea and Daniela. He started the company, they own the company. Go and have lunch together. I took my dog there for the last meeting.

And the big problem with the dog is I kept losing her because she'd go missing into Daniela's office because she kept feeding her biscuits. That's what that food formula is. When I went there for the first time, we went to this small restaurant around the corner. There's a million of them in Italy. You know the small family-run restaurant in Italy, they have good local food and you know it's always going to be good food because it's Italy. And we had lunch there. Yeah, we had a good Italian lunch.

Matt Wragg (37:02.894)
and they had array of salami on the counter and I was like, oh, well I've had to ditch my wife and my child today so I'm gonna buy her a salami. But I was there at the counter and I was talking to Guy and Daniella comes up and she's like, what are you doing? like, oh well I had to leave miles from my son today so I thought I'd buy her a small present. And she insisted on buying the salami for me because she liked that. And it's a stupid little thing but that's why I work at Fonda because these are the people I work with and these are the people that make the products and...

It's hard to explain that, you know, it's like, you know, people come to the factory and they meet everyone and they love the place, but it's how do we, you know, I one thing I'd like to do, and I don't know if you want to do is I'd like to open the factory up to tours. You know, I'd like to have a site where if you want, you know, if you're in Tuscany and want to come and do a morning go around the factory, you can come and see where the stuff's made and do a video go around the factory. But then you also get onto one of the big questions of modern social media, which is distribution.

And this is the really ugly question with content actually. Because let's say you make your 50,000 euro film and you put 50 grand into the budget. Well, unless you've got distribution, that 50,000 euros is basically flushed down the toilet. So suddenly actually do a 50,000 euro video and you probably need 20, 30,000 to back it up with to make sure people see it. Because if you just put it on your YouTube channel, 12 people see it. know, the algorithms and all, you know, how can a company like Formula

effectively do YouTube because to do it, it's a full time job. So to do YouTube, you need two, three, four, five people working full time to keep the volume of correct content going. And it's just not feasible. I mean, this is the thing, the whole social media and the whole internet dynamic is scaled to more and more and more and more. It is scaled to hyper growth. It's scaled to the start at stars model things. Actually, I used to visit Germany a lot when I was at Pinkbike because I liked German businesses.

because they built them this way. They built them as family businesses who could take long-term decisions about where the company's going. for me, there's not the same pressure. There's not the same bank finance. There's not the same constraints. I mean, I think the modern capitalist model is far too focused on the short-term. And that's one of the reasons why like companies like Formula who can say, well, we'll just, you know, okay, it's going to be a bit tough for now, but we'll be okay in five years if you do this.

Matt Wragg (39:23.982)
You know, it's something I like with Canyon. liked the fact that Roman Arnold bought Canyon.com in what, 1998 he bought it? Yeah. You know, he bought the global domain before Canyon even, you know, writes on day one, cause he was like, one day we're going to do this. So I'm going to invest now. And it's, one of the things I always, I wrote about this a for Pinkbiker. Yeah. I like, I love the way Qde did it. mean, Qde is such a, it shouldn't have worked, but somehow it's this huge.

brilliant company that was the second or third largest bike company in Europe for a bunch of like weird dudes who had no idea. Yeah. And I really like this. This for me is, I feel more comfortable in this world. feel, you know, cause I think if we were in, you know, if you start, you know, how many of the small companies that we love, if we, you get into the merciless US startup culture.

And still a family business.

Matt Wragg (40:16.524)
How many of them would still be with us? Do you think Starling would be with us if they would have to answer the investors every six months? You start to get on to bigger questions about what's happening in our world. At what point does the capitalist model we're in that's right down, that's it's leaving people behind, it's creating mass inequalities and the bike industry is just a microcosm of this. At what point is it going to be the small family companies survive or are they going to be choked out by the

massive conglomerates who have billions and billions in investments in other industries that can just swamp the industry. I think this is one of questions for consumers. It's like, how do you want to do this? The honest truth is it today, we can't be certain it's going to work. I mean, the big companies have so much power, can... I think if I was in their position, I'd probably be doing the same or worse because that's the way my brain works. You get in a position, you optimize it.

know, for someone listening to this, it's a question of what do you want the bicycle industry to be? You know, we all know that if you want something cheap and simple, you order it from Amazon and it's there tomorrow. You know, it's plastic and it's made in China and it costs 99 cents and it'll probably break in a month, but it's there tomorrow and it's easy. How do you fight that? How do you, you know, how do you in a world where consumption is, I'm going a bit deep down the rabbit hole here, aren't I? I may be eating it, put coal in

No.

Boris, well notice, was one of the things just to finish off Sam, but when I talk about us being at a fair price, because I think that's one of the challenges for small businesses, because it's like, it's very easy to make a boutique product for 3000 euros. Well, it's relatively, no, it's relatively, it's easier. Let's put it that way. Okay. You know, if you're going to make something with super, super low unit number, super high value, it's a relatively simple business model. Where it gets harder.

Matt Wragg (42:06.198)
is where we are is where we're in much more the mass consumption. We're not competing with Intend. We're not in that sector of the market. We're probably closer to the mazaki than Intend, we're really honest, with where we are in the market. Peg the price so we're, I think, 1300 euro for. The thing is we still think this is a lot of money. And it's one of the reasons why also we put a lot of effort into value for money. One thing

I do want to talk about before we go is like one thing people don't talk about is what do get in the box? And that's something that, know, because if you buy our fork, it's a 1370 euro fork. You get a mud guard, you get a CTS tool, you get a top cap tool, you get Neopost, you get four coil, you get a shock pump. You know, basically you go and buy some seals and you have everything in that. You know, you have three CTS valves as well, so you can retune your fork.

or you need a few seals and for most people they have everything they need for the first two years. And I think that's one of the things that maybe, you know, in the short term reviews doesn't get covered so much is that, you know, what's it like for ownership?

It's good to have FAMULA as an offering. And as you said, you should look into it as a bigger picture. What's in the box, what you're getting as a consumer and what you're getting option wise. If you're still not there because you maybe are heavier or have a very specific idea of how your bike needs to ride. You can still go and order some additional CTS and go down the rabbit hole of suspension tuning and get exactly the right feel you want.

Exactly. mean, of the things I'd like to do, and I'm basically due to start talking about our shops this week. I would like it if the formula of dealers held a CTS box. The problem is I spoke to a shop owner about this and he's like, I'm not sure I'm doing enough turnover to justify it with the honest answer. And we've had to step back from this a little bit and he's like, yeah, how do we do it? But that's, know, the way I'd like to do this is you go to your like a bike shop, bike shop and say, look, I'd like to try a titanium CTS.

Matt Wragg (44:13.26)
And they, you know, they give it to, cause I think we're trying to change the model a bit. Cause I think at the moment, the CTS box probably isn't the right way to do it. So, you know, if you want the damping, you've got to go and buy 300 euros worth of valves. We're trying to break that. It's just trying to do it step by step. Cause I think that, cause that then puts the effective damper price to six to 700 euros. Yeah. If you want the full range of damping. And the honest truth is that with my experience, I can't just look at a graph and go, I want that one. I want to test a few.

So that's where we'd like to get to, it's all the steps. It's how do we bring the shocks with us? How do we start making these steps? And we're hoping this launch is really starting to move us a lot more in that direction. Fundamental question is how do you make it easy to people? If something's too complicated, they're never going to do it. it's the fundamental challenge of any commercial thing is how do you make this an easy solution? Something we're going to focus on for the next two months.

12 months, so have a look how we do that.

Thank you very much for diving into the product and the new Formula Selva V. And as said, hopefully people take the opportunity to reach out to us, read the article, understand the product, what it offers, and maybe reach out and take a ride with us and maybe hop on the product by themselves. Thanks, Jens. Thanks for your time. Thank you. Thank you very much, man. If you enjoyed this podcast and want to get nerdy, you can subscribe and also download the episodes with Dave Weigel or Paul Aston.

We also have German episodes about 3D printing in the bike industry with Christian Lengvenard from Gravity Components or Saki from BikeYoke. Until next time!

 their goal to provide more value on the overall delivery package the consuJens Staudt (00:01.12)
In this episode of the TestPilot Podcast, Matt Rack from Formula will explain the latest update to the Selva fork, the so-called Selva V. You can head to our website and read the review already. But we not only talk about the improvement of this product, we also shed some light on the motivation of Formula to make a product that differs from what is available in the market, their goal to provide more value on the overall delivery package the consumer receives, to create a reliable product for a long period of writing,

all the way to help out with spare parts for many years into the future, helping you enjoy your product for longer. Tune in to learn how Formula is setting their standards in the cycling industry with a commitment to quality and innovation.

Jens Staudt (00:46.924)
And I have Matt Wragg here from Formula. You have an update for me, right?

Yeah, we have a new four card, so yeah, exciting times for us.

So Formula is maybe not one of the major, major players. It's a little bit of boutique Italian bicycle product manufacturer. Put it this way.

I wouldn't say boutique. Boutique is high price. We want to try and be fair price, but yeah, is a bit different. I guess that is fair. But I think that's the point, right? If you want to fork works like Fox and Rock Sharks, well, there's two really obvious places to go and get a fork the works like Fox and Rock Sharks, right? What's the point of formula if we're not going to try and do something different?

Couple of years back, I was talking with Vittorio. Vittorio! Vittorio was, he was doing this video series of people out of the bike industry and he was visiting me, made a video about it and he took one quote out of it and he asked me if dual crown enduro forks will be a thing and I said yes and this was actually before the Belva launch and doing things a little bit differently, Formula has

Jens Staudt (02:01.27)
a double crown Enduro fork and Formula has a CTS system, which lets you as a consumer fine tune the damping characteristics of your fork. So there's many, many tiny solutions and ideas within Formula to make a product very useful to a user,

I Formula has been doing really interesting stuff. I I first rode the suspension 2014. I've been riding this stuff for 10 years now. And for me, it always bothered me that I was riding this stuff and I Jens Staudt (00:01.12)
In this episode of the TestPilot Podcast, Matt Rack from Formula will explain the latest update to the Selva fork, the so-called Selva V. You can head to our website and read the review already. But we not only talk about the improvement of this product, we also shed some light on the motivation of Formula to make a product that differs from what is available in the market, their goal to provide more value on the overall delivery package the consumer receives, to create a reliable product for a long period of writing,

all the way to help out with spare parts for many years into the future, helping you enjoy your product for longer. Tune in to learn how Formula is setting their standards in the cycling industry with a commitment to quality and innovation.

Jens Staudt (00:46.924)
And I have Matt Wragg here from Formula. You have an update for me, right?

Yeah, we have a new four card, so yeah, exciting times for us.

So Formula is maybe not one of the major, major players. It's a little bit of boutique Italian bicycle product manufacturer. Put it this way.

I wouldn't say boutique. Boutique is high price. We want to try and be fair price, but yeah, is a bit different. I guess that is fair. But I think that's the point, right? If you want to fork works like Fox and Rock Sharks, well, there's two really obvious places to go and get a fork the works like Fox and Rock Sharks, right? What's the point of formula if we're not going to try and do something different?

Couple of years back, I was talking with Vittorio. Vittorio! Vittorio was, he was doing this video series of people out of the bike industry and he was visiting me, made a video about it and he took one quote out of it and he asked me if dual crown enduro forks will be a thing and I said yes and this was actually before the Belva launch and doing things a little bit differently, Formula has

Jens Staudt (02:01.27)
a double crown Enduro fork and Formula has a CTS system, which lets you as a consumer fine tune the damping characteristics of your fork. So there's many, many tiny solutions and ideas within Formula to make a product very useful to a user,

I Formula has been doing really interesting stuff. I I first rode the suspension 2014. I've been riding this stuff for 10 years now. And for me, it always bothered me that I was riding this stuff and I was having really good experiences, but then I wasn't seeing it in the media. I felt like with the quality materials, the brand could be doing more basically. Which is where I started talking with Richard, who is now our...

I'm gonna say sales magic for now because I'm not sure what the structure is but he's basically the top commercial guy in formula now.

But when the first silver had been introduced...

I believe it was 2018. The 35 has been around since like 2013, 2014. so the dampers rough, I the dampers, the dampers at least 10 years. mean, basically this fork we've sent you, that damper is a 10 year old design. You know, we haven't changed our damper in 10 years because, you know, I told the engineers and they're like every time they go back and they're like, well, it works. I mean, one of the things that I think

Matt Wragg (03:28.824)
probably wasn't made enough for the time is we were certainly one of the first brands to use a spherical bearing in the damper. We've had that for 10 years. And I think for me, that's a really important thing. think people talk about friction resistance a lot and it's important, but they tend to talk about it in a stat. If you're doing that on a dyno or in the car park, it only gives you so much information. It's only so much use. If you have the softest fork in the car park,

but it can't maintain that under load, is that useful?

We're talking about the new Selva.

B. Yes, if B-

Matt Wragg (04:10.186)
It's for Vald. Basically we have... I have to check what everyone else is using but I'm confident saying that none of the main players are using the same Vald design we are. We are... rather than using bypass ports, we're using a concentric bypass valve. Please don't ask them how that works. This is where you need the engineers. I mean, the thing that I think is really important to a guy like you and me...

is what does that mean if you're using a valve rather than the port? And the short answer is friction. Because if you have a bypass port in the wall of a... If you have a bypass port, every time the seal passes the bypass port, you create a small amount of friction. So therefore to live without friction, you have to use a bigger, thicker seal. And so by removing the bypass port, we can use a lighter seal on the piston head, which reduces the overall friction of the system.

Couple with that, we're using a floating piston head design. it's actually, the piston itself is controlled by two elastic mounts and there's about, think there's something like a millimeter and a half of float in that to allow the valve to balance. Because this actually, our valve action balances at full extension.

What are the key updates for the Selva V over the former version?

honestly that's the real heart of it is that air spring design. It's a much lower friction design than we were using previously and then we've also updated the lower, you know if you're going to do a lower well you're not going to just copy the old one like you may as well make it a bit better. So this one we've increased the height by about eight mils so basically the overall stack height

Matt Wragg (05:54.574)
is identical to Fox and Rock Shogs now, to be honest, 5mm difference I think it was. We've made it a little bit stiffer, we've got an integrated mudguard and we've got a 180 post mount.

mainly an update on the air side so you also got rid of the the coil supported negative spring?

We've not always, we do have a double airstring, we have the R airstring, we've had that for a while. And that was actually the objective for this fork is we, we still looked at the R airstring and if I'm honest, we just, weren't happy with it. I think in terms of out wide performance, that forks from maybe 2019 and in terms of performance, I still think it's a good airstring, I still think it stands up. The problem was that it's, it's how was it to live with the dual, the dual air design. The practical reality is when I was running that fork,

I was deflating, reinflating both chambers every ride to make sure the balance stayed consistent. From what I understand, that's not something that's unique to Formula. I think it's something that's inherent in dual chamber designs. It's, uh, I think it's hard to have stability. And so the first criteria for this ball, cause we wanted a single valve design, a single valve, all air design that was a lot more stable than the previous dual air design.

We might get a little bit carried away already, but can you maybe explain to the average customer what the regular setup process on a Formula Silver V looks like if you just pulled it out of the box?

Matt Wragg (07:20.642)
Honestly, I think for most people just put some air in and go and ride. Honestly, like, you know, we're going to go down the rabbit hole of tuning, but like we send that fork out with the gold CTS and the Neoplast. And I think I said it's like 70 to 80 % of our users use that. And it's just, it's just a nice, simple fork. It's comfortable. It's responsive. It's, all, I think it's all people need. The thing is going to be is like, what happens if you get there and you go, this doesn't feel quite enough for me, which

is where I am to be honest and I imagine where you'd be Jens, you I don't think a guy like you is gonna want quite, you you're gonna need a bit more, right?

I'm a heavy, so.

Yeah, but you know, it's I think yeah. So what I'd say is like, this is why I was trying to break it down into steps. Because if we have the five levels of vows and neopause, I think we can give you a really logical progression. So let's say you get on the fork with the goal, you get on the standard fork. I mean, you know, I really hope that you're just going to go, this is brilliant. We don't need to touch this. You know, that's the perfect scenario for us, right? But the reality is that some people are get and get on, then, you know, some are going to

The most likely thing they're going to say is I need bit more support in this, which is where I am. For me, the gold isn't enough to how I want to ride the bike. Now, one of the things we want to do with this is we want to actually move away from the compression adjusters because the thing that makes our fork is unique is the CTS. And the problem is if you're starting to use the compression adjuster, you tend to feel the compression adjuster more than you're going to feel the shims.

Matt Wragg (08:58.144)
It tends to be like an overwhelming experience. So if we forget the compression adjuster, what I would recommend is saying, well, if you get on the gold CTS and you say, I need some more, the next step would be the orange. If you get on the orange and say, I need some more, the next step would be the green and then the electric blue. And then we have the purple the other way, which is a fully aggressive valve, which is, I think it's about the limits of how light, you know, how light

Damping to you we could possibly make with this fork and I think the the blue for the electric the electric blue or the titanium I think it is now is Probably the hardest we can make so you have like the two extremes there but so we've got these are five major stops and For me, you know, I get to orange and I'm quite happy But if you say got to orange I went I need a little bit more We go to green and go I need a little bit less then the step there by

we'd recommend is actually go back down to the orange and start adding Neopass instead of using more using the compression adjuster because the compression adjuster it's quite, it's quite a, you know, it's quite a blunt instrument. So it, you know, it provides compression all the way through the stroke. Whereas using the Neopass, it doesn't actually affect the initial straight. And so you can then re you can really increase the mid stroke support while maintaining the same initial stroke performance.

which I think is quite unique to this system. don't think there's anything else like that out there at the moment. And it's a bit more of a pain in the ass. You have to open the fork and put the thing in. It's not the simplest thing. But I think one of the strong things with this is it's very hard to get lost. You've got five major way marks. If you're on the green CTS, you know that if you want to go lighter, you go for the orange. It's a very...

You you're always in balance, you're never going to get the LSC and the HSC out of balance.

Jens Staudt (10:54.734)
There are the NeoPos which are kind of foam tokens, volume spaces. We won't dive into the full detail of it. We may explain that in text, I guess. And you have a pretty good video from Formula where you see it in a transparent chamber, which is getting pressurized and you see the behavior of how it actually compresses under higher PSI, for instance.

I think one of the things that we ought to be more clear about is that the Neopost are consumables. They will break down in a certain time. If you use them for long enough, you'll need to change them. I'd have to double check with engineering. don't know if it's a year or two years, we'd say. yeah, because they're phone, they're consumables. But one of the things for me, I think it's really interesting compared to say TPU, volume space.

I'm still, we're making some TPU volume spacers now because people ask for them. You know, so, you know, our job is if someone's asking, we're going to make it for you. You know, it's, it's, we're a business. But my, my position actually is I don't think they're a great solution because they add friction at the seals. One of the things we have been working on with this fork is reducing friction. So to me, it seems a little bit counterintuitive to do all this work to make a low friction damper.

then put in a space that's going to deliberately increase the friction. think it's, I'd have to get Aiman to double check to explain the physics to me, but it's, I know, you know, I know there's definitely a frictional downside to the TPU spaces. Whereas the, the Neopost there isn't there, they don't increase friction at all. So that's, I think that's really quite a nice advantage. One of the things I've found with this tuning as well is like going to this set of values, I'm getting much more into like a more

I don't want to say linear, because it's not quite the right word, but a much more consistent level of progression through the cartridge. I for me, I think that's the big advantage set. I mean, I'm on the Orange CTS with one neopost in the air spring. And I feel like I've got a set up where the progression of both the damper and the air spring, they feel really matched together. And this is why I've not done much with the progressive stuff. It's in the past. I used to like really progressive, whereas going to this.

Matt Wragg (13:09.388)
Yeah, but having like fairly consistent and kind of match level support for the spring and the cartridge and then using a faster rebound to help it come back to you more gives a fork where you can use much more the travel because I mean, something I didn't realize at first that like, you know, if you make something really progressive, it's very hard to damp it because the damping in either the start and the end of the stroke is so different. So a consistent kind of consistent level of progression like this.

It feels like they're working much more in harmony, if that makes sense?

For the new fork, the old one was interesting because the recommendation PSI for the air chamber was only going up to 90 kilos. Is this increased now?

This was part of the reason for doing this because, you know, if you've got a coil negative spring, you know, it's a coil, so there's physically a hard limit to the riders that can support. And that's why we had the R air spring initially, but again, you know, I've talked about that. that's part of the thing with this. And one of the design criteria of this is that it can support a really high, a wide range of pressures. Yeah. mean, there's certain advantages of doing a simple design like the self-rested coil negative spring. It's a very robust product.

There are limits and we can't pretend they're not. So having a full air spring like this means a guy at 100 kilos, 120 kilos should still be able to find that setting where there's, mean, we work with a guy called Paul Shepherd for UK distribution and he's like a ex rugby fart playing cage fighting valleys lad from Wales. I'm always very nice to Paul, but the point is.

Jens Staudt (14:43.438)
Ha ha ha.

He says it in the clean, he can't ride that spring. That was one of the big things with this, to try and get something because it's not just big riders, it's lighter riders as well. I think if you get down to 50-55 kilos kind of thing, you're going to find the same kind of issues that just isn't the range and the coil negatives.

What kind of travels are available for this fork?

We're launching at 160, 170 at 80s as the native spring lanes. I think we need to do 140 and 150 at some point. it just depends on what people ask us for, to be honest. Part of the decision is we actually wanted to launch this as a Mendeiro fork because for us, is what, yeah, mean, this is again, one of the things about doing it differently. This is a fork for us and where we ride. I mean, I live here in the south of France, so the trails are long.

and they're rocky and they're very technical. For those kinds of trails, want the two most important criteria are comfort and precision. And I think for me, that's what we've really hit with this for. me, mean, when we talk, I guess we're getting into 38 versus 35 here, right? And whatever, I think it's good. I think, you know, we have, you know,

Jens Staudt (15:56.718)
Thumbpoint?

Matt Wragg (16:03.094)
We're not going to persuade everyone. A lot of people are really happy with 38mm forks and we're not trying to say you're wrong. It's not saying, again, because we're not trying to make a fork for a million people, we're trying to make a fork for how we want to ride and how we want to do things. We're very convinced with the way they do this. I for me, I don't know if I'd go back to a 38mm chassis now, no matter which plan I rode for.

I you know, I talked to our sales manager, Richard, and he's about the same weight as you. He's 90 odd kilos. And he's, you know, he grew up racing with guys like Loic Bruni. So he's, he doesn't hang around, shall we say, you know, he's riding this fork of 180 mil on a full power e-bike, full chat. And when he starts taking the technical package and working out where we've done the things that on the long descents. the precision, I think that's the most important when we talk about stiffness.

For me, that's the most important metric because, how much stiffness do you need on your bike? It's, you know, who can tell you? Do you need 30 % more or 10 % more or 15 %? I don't know.

We saw that in with carbon wheels to bring a different example and they increase the stiffness over the top, which resulted in a bad riding experience. You lost grip, you lost comfort and the same goes for a 38 fork. And I mean, I'm a heavy rider and I'm not always down to having a 38 mil stanchions on my fork. think there is somewhat of a comfort and you may call it flex and you have an increase in grip as well.

Let's go back to the essentials here. Let's go, okay, well, how much stiffness in a fork do you need? How much is the essential stiffness? And the essential stiffness actually is, can you place the front wheel where you want it every single time? If you start getting noobly steering, if you can't place the front wheel, that fork is not stiffen it. But this is the thing. So at some point, we left this point so far behind that we've

Matt Wragg (18:07.51)
And then you start getting, well, how much chassis flex do you want? Well, that's preference. Getting the wheel in the right place is primitive. How much chassis flex you want, that's preference. But also we come back to the spherical damper as well, the spherical bearing on the damper. If you've got a more consistent response through the strobe, no one really talked about how much does the binding of a damper and the lateral load affect the steering performance? And so if you've got a damper that doesn't bind under load as much,

How much stiffness do you need? mean, it was always one of the things that no one talked about with the 38s. was one of the big advantages is the stiffer chassis means less lateral load for the damper. And I can't quantify for this for you. This, you know, it's one of those things it's very hard to kind of say, well, this is black and this is white. You know, it's more my experience is that certainly I'm 70 kilos. I like to think I'm a good weight and I'm riding on a full power e-bike.

I'm very confident in the feeling I have of the front wheel on my bike. that's probably the, you know, how much more can I say really? You know, and yeah, then there is the element of comfort as well though, cause it's, you know, if you're going through long, you know, I mean, my favorite trail goes from 1200 meters to 700 meters in what one descent and it's, you know, it's all, it's all rocking yield trails. And for that actually, I don't want the big heavy chassis. find, you know, the bent, you know, I

The difference of having a 35 mil Shastian having a bit more compliance over that kind of distance for me is massive. And so when we talk about the precision, you know, how precise can you be if you can't feel your hands?

Also, if you're looking into the trend and everybody is now catching on with upside down forks, I mean, they won't be anywhere near stiffness wise as a 38 right side up. If you want to put it this way.

Matt Wragg (19:56.268)
I'd love to them because they look cool as hell. One of the things we've tried to focus on with this fork is price. One of things we do that with is by not going in too many different directions. To make a really good USD fork is expensive.

You also put a sticker in your box saying, we promise you 10 years of spare parts.

I mean, that honestly came from visiting the factory formula. There's a room, if you go downstairs through on the bottom floor on the right hand side of the building, there's a room at the back of the building where they've just got a wall of drawers. And I was looking at this, it's like, what's that? Oh, you know, we have every part of every product we've ever made. I mean, it's probably not quite that. mean, one of the reasons we put a time limit on how far back it goes, I think it was 2019 and older.

that then means it's the Selva, the Mod, the Cura 4, the Cura and we 100 % know, you know, those we will say yes we 100 % have those parts. If you have an old one break of a 35 fork or some of the older stuff we probably have the

But it's a nice thing to have. And some manufacturers, just like come up with new stuff and then ask you to toss out old stuff if you need a replacement part and you could just repair it. I mean, it's nice to be able to repair it.

Matt Wragg (21:05.409)
Isn't that just a normal thing to do?

Matt Wragg (21:17.836)
You know, it's questions about where the market is, because this is where we'd like to focus on formics. I think the strength of Formula, the real strength is they're great products to live with. You know, I've spent 10 years living with them and I think they're great products to live with. Yeah, my wife will say the Formula forks will always have failure to work on. The brakes, it's little things like both the bleed valves on the brakes are threaded. And for me, that makes a big difference to me that it's really good stuff to live with. also the problem is...

We're not telling you we'll buy a new fork in two years. that's commercially, that makes it more difficult for us. As a small manufacturer, we're not selling the large volumes. We're not saying you have to change next year. I think it's the big challenge for us to try and work out where we fit in the market at the moment. Because I think so much of the market is very much focused on the ultra high end and the most shiny sighting stuff. And that's not really what we do. We want to make...

You we want to make simple, reliable, high performance products. You know, it's at a fair price. That's what it's just trying to find. How do we connect that with people? There's honestly the question is, is that even what people want today? We believe in this. We, know, you, come into meet the team, you know, most people have formula because they like the products. They like the companies, you know, you, untold to formula owners. They tell, know, people had a go, a lot of formula owners, they'll tend to stick with us for multiple years and multiple products. It's, know, it's just.

It's that initial step to get someone into formula. you know, honestly, of the big questions to us in the next two to five years is, is this actually what the market wants? Does the market want what we're giving? Like, you know, for me, what I want is a fork that's a fair price, that works well and keeps working. And that's what I think we're doing.

Well, what I really like about Formula is now with the CTS and you have a product which is fairly easy in setting it up. And then if you are down to like really getting the last percentage out of it, you have the option to go into that. And you not only have the option in the fork, but also at the shock. So there's a broad spectrum you can have and get performance wise from a Formula product in a Formula suspension. Front and rear.

Matt Wragg (23:34.028)
It's the things where you start to understand the realities of the markets these days. You can have an idea that you know is right, you are certain is right, but the question is, does it connect with the public? Does it connect with the modern ways of marketing, the modern ways of selling? And I believe we can. I don't see a reason why we shouldn't be able to do it, but I think we also need to stay open to the possibility that...

I mean, I'm not sure if and when you'll see an electronic product from Formula. To me, that doesn't concern me. I have very little interest in electronic suspension. And I really hope there's people out there like me who don't want that on the bike. You want the simplicity, you want the controls, you know. And I really hope there were people out there like that. know, and I need people and I see people, but it's the one thing you start to learn when, I mean, it's the interesting thing coming from journalism to working in-house is...

You start to, don't know, it's frustrating at times I guess, because sometimes the best idea in the world can be a complete commercial failure. And that's, know, we all know examples of this. I'm just worried I'm going a bit negative here, but it's... The thing is that's what you realise is maybe that's not enough. I'm convinced that, you know, for me like feeling that was enough. Feeling that riding sensation, like I want to keep this fork, I'm happy. Can we connect that to the public? Is that... I don't know. I don't, you we don't...

No worries.

Jens Staudt (24:57.568)
Is there a way to actually for a consumer who hop on the product before buying it? Is there somewhat of a demo program?

You know, I can tell you the demo program would be a great thing, but the question is like, what's the commercial reality for a company like Formula One? You know, and that's actually what it often comes down to is like, well, what do we need to do today? And the honest reality, the honest truth is that some of these, you know, there's so many things you could do, so many things you could try, but you end up having to be really focused because yeah, you know, you have to try and make the things in front of you work before you try the next thing.

And you know, we're such a small team, know, the formulas, you know, there's some administrators and there's the factory and all that behind me, but there's the big factory behind me. You actually start looking this fall for instance, there's Lucas, the engineer, Giancarlo is the head of engineer. San Francesco is the head of engineering. think San Welle, so you maybe got four people on the engineering side who've involved primarily Luca though. Then you've got myself and Simmel marketing, Richard in sales, Eamon.

and Baptiste in commercial and then 12 people. It's not a lot of people to do a lot of jobs. It's one of the challenges with a small company. It's like, do you find ways to take the risk? I think it's one of exciting times of my job is because we don't have the resource to go, well, let's just do a 50,000 euro video.

And yeah, have it, have it from the front page of every major website. We can't, we physically can't do that. And so we have to try and find a way to use the resources we have in the most efficient way possible. And, and that is Formula is an Italian engineering company. And I started thinking, well, how do we show this? And it's, it's not doing videos. It's making products. It's explaining them. It's trying to help people. I think we've made good progress in the last couple of years, and I think there's a lot more to do. And I'm just.

Matt Wragg (26:58.254)
I just really hope people like this fork because I think it's a good one. really do. I've spent a lot of time on this fork and I really like this fork, but also know that just because I like it and I'm impressed doesn't mean it's going to connect when it gets out there. I actually think journalists would do the job better if they understood that fear from this side of what it means to someone. You and I, Jans, we've both written back.

written bad reviews about things in the times because it's the job. now with this experience on the other side, understand now that, because you don't really think about the investment that's the investment that goes into it. I've been writing this forks for a year. We've been taught, the launch has been going around for six months. It's been in development for two or three years. It's so much work goes into something like this. And then you send it to a journalist and if you get a good one.

It's great if you get a bad one and they just go, this is garbage. You that's two, three years of, and it's, you know, you can't control it. It's the chaos. mean, one of the things that they asked about strategy in this is should we even still talk to journalists? And I think you have to, I think you have to accept the chaos that you're not necessarily going to get the results you want. Cause that's how you build, the reviews help people build confidence.

But it's scary and it's emotional and it's upsetting, you know, from this side, the amount of emotion that goes into a launch. I find it really surprising. Yeah.

It's a good thing to explain that we also at Testpilot, we're trying to give the readers or AKA consumers the possibility to test the product. So while the product now is out there and had been launched and you can read about it, you should also take on the possibility to test ride it. And we are doing like what we call co-pilot. So you can reach out to us and then actually get on the product.

Jens Staudt (29:01.056)
and we help you set it up and then you get to experience and then you can actually verify what we found in our testing process about the product and see if we were right or not.

That's very, I like, that's cool. That's very cool. This is what I like about your project. And honestly, since you've told about it, I've told a few people about what you're doing. I'm genuinely very impressed because when I talk, you know, and when we're talking about media models, you know, I think what you're doing is interesting because you've understood where the value is and what you can do and who, you know, where, the value is for. So I think this is one of the, maybe the things, you know, with a lot of the models we see for journalism today, the emphasis of paying goes to the consumer.

Whereas the value for what's been happening is more with the industry. But I mean, one of the disconnects for me, for instance, is I don't think, yeah, I'm not a fan of above the line advertising. Personally, for me, I don't, I've never been convinced to be. I think if you've got a big and broad marketing budget, it's worth having it there. But for someone like us at Formula, where we're limited resources and focus and effectivity, I'm yet to see data that convinces me that it's a solid investment to a company like S.

And so the problem is the company's coming to us and say, well, yeah, the site's going to say, well, will you invest in some advertising? No, because I don't see any value. And it was, you know, and I actually tried to talk to another site before this and look, I'm not interested in advert, but I'd like to support your guys. Can you make me a proposal about how we can do this? So I don't care about that. I don't particularly care about banner adverts on your site. And certainly I do not want to see, I never want to see formulas logo on a popup advert in the middle of the page.

the reader's experience.

Matt Wragg (30:40.17)
Or the YouTube interstitial things like when did YouTube start putting them on every three minutes? You know, I think, this is one of big questions of marketing now that we touched on the last discussion. Right. Yeah. There's a lot of questions about where's the value and how do you connect with people? And what you say about like demo centers. I think that's the next big phase for us at Formula. I think, you know, I don't know how we do it yet and I don't know how we do it with the resources, but how do we go out and start making that connection? How do we get people on the floor that help,

There's practical things like, you know, we have a bunch of good distributors, but the problem is if you go and say to the distributor, can I have the full email list of your shops? You know, that's not such an easy discussion to have. That becomes political and commercial. It's actually, you know, you start finding that like these things that you thought were going to be really simple, you know, you have this idea that let's, you know, let's do them, you know, do this. And suddenly you start going through the practical steps and you're like,

I think it's going be an interesting question for a company of formula size about how can we do that and how do we invest our resources? I would say if I had money in my pocket, I had budget today, I would be going to try and meet people rather than putting it above the line advertising. That would definitely be the way. think technology is going to offer some different things for this. How can we use social media, video? How can we make ourselves available online? those are some of it. I think it's going to be some of the questions for me personally.

Because, you know, I'm here talking to you today because, you know, we had some chats in Formula and we thought I was probably the best person to come and talk to you. I've been the one doing a lot of work on this testing and tuning and development and connecting it to the communication and the market and all that. so this is kind of a new, this is a new phase. Yeah. Talking to you today maybe signifies the start of a new phase in my career. Well, I can talk to journalists, but why aren't I talking, you know, why am I not talking to shops and the general public?

You know, how do we do that? What would that look like? What would that be useful to you then? And it's, there's a lot of questions and so, you know, we want to take a time and try and do it the right way. But I, I definitely think the long-term future of communications is going to be getting close, is going to be getting closer to our users rather than to the media.

Jens Staudt (32:54.79)
forward to be helpful in regards of with getting people on the product and I hope people will actually take that opportunity and then we can work from there.

I think there's a certain amount of inertia around people. People are used to a fork working a certain way, which is why I think it's good that you can just take the fork out of the box and go. I think that's really important. If you had to change a CTS or add Neopost to the first step, I think we failed. I don't think that's a quality you should have in the market. Where one of the journalists said, oh, well, I didn't want to use the CTS system. And so then he marked us down that a fork wasn't very adjustable. it's like, but you haven't used our adjustment system.

and you want to mark us down for adjustability and it's... To me that pose a lot of I think that pose a lot of interesting questions because how are people gonna be when they get this system? You know, what happens when you get the chaos that is the great public? You and I that do this for a living we might be really convinced for CTS but maybe if I, you know, if I go to finale tomorrow and speak to ten people they're gonna tell me to fuck off. So actually maybe what I need to go and do is go and speak to people in finale and understand why they're telling me to fuck off.

One big paradox on in the bike industry is people want to have the adjusters, all of them, and then they turn it exactly once. This same goes for geometry adjustments on the bike. Yeah. And it's just maybe a paradox on of the bike industry.

I think it's the disconnect between the comments and the reality of it. When I say about what commercial reality, ask what commercial reality we're facing. I think if you went and asked people, would you like a fork at a fair price that's good quality and high performance, they'll say yes. when you show them the formula fork with the CTS system, when you actually put in front of them, a lot of the time people will go back to the familiar or they'll try and use it like the familiar.

Matt Wragg (34:47.436)
and then it's not working quite the way you'd... and it's a challenge and it's the way we have to go at Formula. think, because honestly, if we do the same things as Fox, as RockShox, as Olims, as Cane Creek, as DVO, all these brands, I don't notice any of them putting out a bad fork right now. It's not like 10 years ago where this one worked and that one doesn't. Every fork is a good one.

You mentioned it before, you said it's an Italian engineering company. Yeah. And maybe this is a good summary. There are plenty of forks out there and there's no need for another me too product. So that's the reason why formula does things differently. And you have options like the Neopause and the CTS and you have, can use it in a different kind of way. And this should speak to a couple of people.

If we stop and talk to people and take the time, then they go, yes, you know, this is good. know, and that's, think it's the challenges, like, you know, where do you start with that process? Cause you know, practically it starts with one-to-one conversations, but it's then how many one-to-one conversations you physically have until you move on to the next step and how long those one-to-one take to net conversations takes to filter down the line. I don't think it's a secret that it's, it's tough for small businesses in the bike industry right now.

And I think every small business will agree out there that it's a race to try and make sure they can make those connections to be here for the longterm. that's what we're really focused on, like formulas. Yeah, it comes back to tele engineering company. It's a very conservative, it's quite a conservative company in many ways. It's a small family run company. I go there and I sit down with Andrea and Daniela. He started the company, they own the company. Go and have lunch together. I took my dog there for the last meeting.

And the big problem with the dog is I kept losing her because she'd go missing into Daniela's office because she kept feeding her biscuits. That's what that food formula is. When I went there for the first time, we went to this small restaurant around the corner. There's a million of them in Italy. You know the small family-run restaurant in Italy, they have good local food and you know it's always going to be good food because it's Italy. And we had lunch there. Yeah, we had a good Italian lunch.

Matt Wragg (37:02.894)
and they had array of salami on the counter and I was like, oh, well I've had to ditch my wife and my child today so I'm gonna buy her a salami. But I was there at the counter and I was talking to Guy and Daniella comes up and she's like, what are you doing? like, oh well I had to leave miles from my son today so I thought I'd buy her a small present. And she insisted on buying the salami for me because she liked that. And it's a stupid little thing but that's why I work at Fonda because these are the people I work with and these are the people that make the products and...

It's hard to explain that, you know, it's like, you know, people come to the factory and they meet everyone and they love the place, but it's how do we, you know, I one thing I'd like to do, and I don't know if you want to do is I'd like to open the factory up to tours. You know, I'd like to have a site where if you want, you know, if you're in Tuscany and want to come and do a morning go around the factory, you can come and see where the stuff's made and do a video go around the factory. But then you also get onto one of the big questions of modern social media, which is distribution.

And this is the really ugly question with content actually. Because let's say you make your 50,000 euro film and you put 50 grand into the budget. Well, unless you've got distribution, that 50,000 euros is basically flushed down the toilet. So suddenly actually do a 50,000 euro video and you probably need 20, 30,000 to back it up with to make sure people see it. Because if you just put it on your YouTube channel, 12 people see it. know, the algorithms and all, you know, how can a company like Formula

effectively do YouTube because to do it, it's a full time job. So to do YouTube, you need two, three, four, five people working full time to keep the volume of correct content going. And it's just not feasible. I mean, this is the thing, the whole social media and the whole internet dynamic is scaled to more and more and more and more. It is scaled to hyper growth. It's scaled to the start at stars model things. Actually, I used to visit Germany a lot when I was at Pinkbike because I liked German businesses.

because they built them this way. They built them as family businesses who could take long-term decisions about where the company's going. for me, there's not the same pressure. There's not the same bank finance. There's not the same constraints. I mean, I think the modern capitalist model is far too focused on the short-term. And that's one of the reasons why like companies like Formula who can say, well, we'll just, you know, okay, it's going to be a bit tough for now, but we'll be okay in five years if you do this.

Matt Wragg (39:23.982)
You know, it's something I like with Canyon. liked the fact that Roman Arnold bought Canyon.com in what, 1998 he bought it? Yeah. You know, he bought the global domain before Canyon even, you know, writes on day one, cause he was like, one day we're going to do this. So I'm going to invest now. And it's, one of the things I always, I wrote about this a for Pinkbiker. Yeah. I like, I love the way Qde did it. mean, Qde is such a, it shouldn't have worked, but somehow it's this huge.

brilliant company that was the second or third largest bike company in Europe for a bunch of like weird dudes who had no idea. Yeah. And I really like this. This for me is, I feel more comfortable in this world. feel, you know, cause I think if we were in, you know, if you start, you know, how many of the small companies that we love, if we, you get into the merciless US startup culture.

And still a family business.

Matt Wragg (40:16.524)
How many of them would still be with us? Do you think Starling would be with us if they would have to answer the investors every six months? You start to get on to bigger questions about what's happening in our world. At what point does the capitalist model we're in that's right down, that's it's leaving people behind, it's creating mass inequalities and the bike industry is just a microcosm of this. At what point is it going to be the small family companies survive or are they going to be choked out by the

massive conglomerates who have billions and billions in investments in other industries that can just swamp the industry. I think this is one of questions for consumers. It's like, how do you want to do this? The honest truth is it today, we can't be certain it's going to work. I mean, the big companies have so much power, can... I think if I was in their position, I'd probably be doing the same or worse because that's the way my brain works. You get in a position, you optimize it.

know, for someone listening to this, it's a question of what do you want the bicycle industry to be? You know, we all know that if you want something cheap and simple, you order it from Amazon and it's there tomorrow. You know, it's plastic and it's made in China and it costs 99 cents and it'll probably break in a month, but it's there tomorrow and it's easy. How do you fight that? How do you, you know, how do you in a world where consumption is, I'm going a bit deep down the rabbit hole here, aren't I? I may be eating it, put coal in

No.

Boris, well notice, was one of the things just to finish off Sam, but when I talk about us being at a fair price, because I think that's one of the challenges for small businesses, because it's like, it's very easy to make a boutique product for 3000 euros. Well, it's relatively, no, it's relatively, it's easier. Let's put it that way. Okay. You know, if you're going to make something with super, super low unit number, super high value, it's a relatively simple business model. Where it gets harder.

Matt Wragg (42:06.198)
is where we are is where we're in much more the mass consumption. We're not competing with Intend. We're not in that sector of the market. We're probably closer to the mazaki than Intend, we're really honest, with where we are in the market. Peg the price so we're, I think, 1300 euro for. The thing is we still think this is a lot of money. And it's one of the reasons why also we put a lot of effort into value for money. One thing

I do want to talk about before we go is like one thing people don't talk about is what do get in the box? And that's something that, know, because if you buy our fork, it's a 1370 euro fork. You get a mud guard, you get a CTS tool, you get a top cap tool, you get Neopost, you get four coil, you get a shock pump. You know, basically you go and buy some seals and you have everything in that. You know, you have three CTS valves as well, so you can retune your fork.

or you need a few seals and for most people they have everything they need for the first two years. And I think that's one of the things that maybe, you know, in the short term reviews doesn't get covered so much is that, you know, what's it like for ownership?

It's good to have FAMULA as an offering. And as you said, you should look into it as a bigger picture. What's in the box, what you're getting as a consumer and what you're getting option wise. If you're still not there because you maybe are heavier or have a very specific idea of how your bike needs to ride. You can still go and order some additional CTS and go down the rabbit hole of suspension tuning and get exactly the right feel you want.

Exactly. mean, of the things I'd like to do, and I'm basically due to start talking about our shops this week. I would like it if the formula of dealers held a CTS box. The problem is I spoke to a shop owner about this and he's like, I'm not sure I'm doing enough turnover to justify it with the honest answer. And we've had to step back from this a little bit and he's like, yeah, how do we do it? But that's, know, the way I'd like to do this is you go to your like a bike shop, bike shop and say, look, I'd like to try a titanium CTS.

Matt Wragg (44:13.26)
And they, you know, they give it to, cause I think we're trying to change the model a bit. Cause I think at the moment, the CTS box probably isn't the right way to do it. So, you know, if you want the damping, you've got to go and buy 300 euros worth of valves. We're trying to break that. It's just trying to do it step by step. Cause I think that, cause that then puts the effective damper price to six to 700 euros. Yeah. If you want the full range of damping. And the honest truth is that with my experience, I can't just look at a graph and go, I want that one. I want to test a few.

So that's where we'd like to get to, it's all the steps. It's how do we bring the shocks with us? How do we start making these steps? And we're hoping this launch is really starting to move us a lot more in that direction. Fundamental question is how do you make it easy to people? If something's too complicated, they're never going to do it. it's the fundamental challenge of any commercial thing is how do you make this an easy solution? Something we're going to focus on for the next two months.

12 months, so have a look how we do that.

Thank you very much for diving into the product and the new Formula Selva V. And as said, hopefully people take the opportunity to reach out to us, read the article, understand the product, what it offers, and maybe reach out and take a ride with us and maybe hop on the product by themselves. Thanks, Jens. Thanks for your time. Thank you. Thank you very much, man. If you enjoyed this podcast and want to get nerdy, you can subscribe and also download the episodes with Dave Weigel or Paul Aston.

We also have German episodes about 3D printing in the bike industry with Christian Lengvenard from Gravity Components or Saki from BikeYoke. Until next time!

was having really good experiences, but then I wasn't seeing it in the media. I felt like with the quality materials, the brand could be doing more basically. Which is where I started talking with Richard, who is now our...

I'm gonna say sales magic for now because I'm not sure what the structure is but he's basically the top commercial guy in formula now.

But when the first silver had been introduced...

I believe it was 2018. The 35 has been around since like 2013, 2014. so the dampers rough, I the dampers, the dampers at least 10 years. mean, basically this fork we've sent you, that damper is a 10 year old design. You know, we haven't changed our damper in 10 years because, you know, I told the engineers and they're like every time they go back and they're like, well, it works. I mean, one of the things that I think

Matt Wragg (03:28.824)
probably wasn't made enough for the time is we were certainly one of the first brands to use a spherical bearing in the damper. We've had that for 10 years. And I think for me, that's a really important thing. think people talk about friction resistance a lot and it's important, but they tend to talk about it in a stat. If you're doing that on a dyno or in the car park, it only gives you so much information. It's only so much use. If you have the softest fork in the car park,

but it can't maintain that under load, is that useful?

We're talking about the new Selva.

B. Yes, if B-

Matt Wragg (04:10.186)
It's for Vald. Basically we have... I have to check what everyone else is using but I'm confident saying that none of the main players are using the same Vald design we are. We are... rather than using bypass ports, we're using a concentric bypass valve. Please don't ask them how that works. This is where you need the engineers. I mean, the thing that I think is really important to a guy like you and me...

is what does that mean if you're using a valve rather than the port? And the short answer is friction. Because if you have a bypass port in the wall of a... If you have a bypass port, every time the seal passes the bypass port, you create a small amount of friction. So therefore to live without friction, you have to use a bigger, thicker seal. And so by removing the bypass port, we can use a lighter seal on the piston head, which reduces the overall friction of the system.

Couple with that, we're using a floating piston head design. it's actually, the piston itself is controlled by two elastic mounts and there's about, think there's something like a millimeter and a half of float in that to allow the valve to balance. Because this actually, our valve action balances at full extension.

What are the key updates for the Selva V over the former version?

honestly that's the real heart of it is that air spring design. It's a much lower friction design than we were using previously and then we've also updated the lower, you know if you're going to do a lower well you're not going to just copy the old one like you may as well make it a bit better. So this one we've increased the height by about eight mils so basically the overall stack height

Matt Wragg (05:54.574)
is identical to Fox and Rock Shogs now, to be honest, 5mm difference I think it was. We've made it a little bit stiffer, we've got an integrated mudguard and we've got a 180 post mount.

mainly an update on the air side so you also got rid of the the coil supported negative spring?

We've not always, we do have a double airstring, we have the R airstring, we've had that for a while. And that was actually the objective for this fork is we, we still looked at the R airstring and if I'm honest, we just, weren't happy with it. I think in terms of out wide performance, that forks from maybe 2019 and in terms of performance, I still think it's a good airstring, I still think it stands up. The problem was that it's, it's how was it to live with the dual, the dual air design. The practical reality is when I was running that fork,

I was deflating, reinflating both chambers every ride to make sure the balance stayed consistent. From what I understand, that's not something that's unique to Formula. I think it's something that's inherent in dual chamber designs. It's, uh, I think it's hard to have stability. And so the first criteria for this ball, cause we wanted a single valve design, a single valve, all air design that was a lot more stable than the previous dual air design.

We might get a little bit carried away already, but can you maybe explain to the average customer what the regular setup process on a Formula Silver V looks like if you just pulled it out of the box?

Matt Wragg (07:20.642)
Honestly, I think for most people just put some air in and go and ride. Honestly, like, you know, we're going to go down the rabbit hole of tuning, but like we send that fork out with the gold CTS and the Neoplast. And I think I said it's like 70 to 80 % of our users use that. And it's just, it's just a nice, simple fork. It's comfortable. It's responsive. It's, all, I think it's all people need. The thing is going to be is like, what happens if you get there and you go, this doesn't feel quite enough for me, which

is where I am to be honest and I imagine where you'd be Jens, you I don't think a guy like you is gonna want quite, you you're gonna need a bit more, right?

I'm a heavy, so.

Yeah, but you know, it's I think yeah. So what I'd say is like, this is why I was trying to break it down into steps. Because if we have the five levels of vows and neopause, I think we can give you a really logical progression. So let's say you get on the fork with the goal, you get on the standard fork. I mean, you know, I really hope that you're just going to go, this is brilliant. We don't need to touch this. You know, that's the perfect scenario for us, right? But the reality is that some people are get and get on, then, you know, some are going to

The most likely thing they're going to say is I need bit more support in this, which is where I am. For me, the gold isn't enough to how I want to ride the bike. Now, one of the things we want to do with this is we want to actually move away from the compression adjusters because the thing that makes our fork is unique is the CTS. And the problem is if you're starting to use the compression adjuster, you tend to feel the compression adjuster more than you're going to feel the shims.

Matt Wragg (08:58.144)
It tends to be like an overwhelming experience. So if we forget the compression adjuster, what I would recommend is saying, well, if you get on the gold CTS and you say, I need some more, the next step would be the orange. If you get on the orange and say, I need some more, the next step would be the green and then the electric blue. And then we have the purple the other way, which is a fully aggressive valve, which is, I think it's about the limits of how light, you know, how light

Damping to you we could possibly make with this fork and I think the the blue for the electric the electric blue or the titanium I think it is now is Probably the hardest we can make so you have like the two extremes there but so we've got these are five major stops and For me, you know, I get to orange and I'm quite happy But if you say got to orange I went I need a little bit more We go to green and go I need a little bit less then the step there by

we'd recommend is actually go back down to the orange and start adding Neopass instead of using more using the compression adjuster because the compression adjuster it's quite, it's quite a, you know, it's quite a blunt instrument. So it, you know, it provides compression all the way through the stroke. Whereas using the Neopass, it doesn't actually affect the initial straight. And so you can then re you can really increase the mid stroke support while maintaining the same initial stroke performance.

which I think is quite unique to this system. don't think there's anything else like that out there at the moment. And it's a bit more of a pain in the ass. You have to open the fork and put the thing in. It's not the simplest thing. But I think one of the strong things with this is it's very hard to get lost. You've got five major way marks. If you're on the green CTS, you know that if you want to go lighter, you go for the orange. It's a very...

You you're always in balance, you're never going to get the LSC and the HSC out of balance.

Jens Staudt (10:54.734)
There are the NeoPos which are kind of foam tokens, volume spaces. We won't dive into the full detail of it. We may explain that in text, I guess. And you have a pretty good video from Formula where you see it in a transparent chamber, which is getting pressurized and you see the behavior of how it actually compresses under higher PSI, for instance.

I think one of the things that we ought to be more clear about is that the Neopost are consumables. They will break down in a certain time. If you use them for long enough, you'll need to change them. I'd have to double check with engineering. don't know if it's a year or two years, we'd say. yeah, because they're phone, they're consumables. But one of the things for me, I think it's really interesting compared to say TPU, volume space.

I'm still, we're making some TPU volume spacers now because people ask for them. You know, so, you know, our job is if someone's asking, we're going to make it for you. You know, it's, it's, we're a business. But my, my position actually is I don't think they're a great solution because they add friction at the seals. One of the things we have been working on with this fork is reducing friction. So to me, it seems a little bit counterintuitive to do all this work to make a low friction damper.

then put in a space that's going to deliberately increase the friction. think it's, I'd have to get Aiman to double check to explain the physics to me, but it's, I know, you know, I know there's definitely a frictional downside to the TPU spaces. Whereas the, the Neopost there isn't there, they don't increase friction at all. So that's, I think that's really quite a nice advantage. One of the things I've found with this tuning as well is like going to this set of values, I'm getting much more into like a more

I don't want to say linear, because it's not quite the right word, but a much more consistent level of progression through the cartridge. I for me, I think that's the big advantage set. I mean, I'm on the Orange CTS with one neopost in the air spring. And I feel like I've got a set up where the progression of both the damper and the air spring, they feel really matched together. And this is why I've not done much with the progressive stuff. It's in the past. I used to like really progressive, whereas going to this.

Matt Wragg (13:09.388)
Yeah, but having like fairly consistent and kind of match level support for the spring and the cartridge and then using a faster rebound to help it come back to you more gives a fork where you can use much more the travel because I mean, something I didn't realize at first that like, you know, if you make something really progressive, it's very hard to damp it because the damping in either the start and the end of the stroke is so different. So a consistent kind of consistent level of progression like this.

It feels like they're working much more in harmony, if that makes sense?

For the new fork, the old one was interesting because the recommendation PSI for the air chamber was only going up to 90 kilos. Is this increased now?

This was part of the reason for doing this because, you know, if you've got a coil negative spring, you know, it's a coil, so there's physically a hard limit to the riders that can support. And that's why we had the R air spring initially, but again, you know, I've talked about that. that's part of the thing with this. And one of the design criteria of this is that it can support a really high, a wide range of pressures. Yeah. mean, there's certain advantages of doing a simple design like the self-rested coil negative spring. It's a very robust product.

There are limits and we can't pretend they're not. So having a full air spring like this means a guy at 100 kilos, 120 kilos should still be able to find that setting where there's, mean, we work with a guy called Paul Shepherd for UK distribution and he's like a ex rugby fart playing cage fighting valleys lad from Wales. I'm always very nice to Paul, but the point is.

Jens Staudt (14:43.438)
Ha ha ha.

He says it in the clean, he can't ride that spring. That was one of the big things with this, to try and get something because it's not just big riders, it's lighter riders as well. I think if you get down to 50-55 kilos kind of thing, you're going to find the same kind of issues that just isn't the range and the coil negatives.

What kind of travels are available for this fork?

We're launching at 160, 170 at 80s as the native spring lanes. I think we need to do 140 and 150 at some point. it just depends on what people ask us for, to be honest. Part of the decision is we actually wanted to launch this as a Mendeiro fork because for us, is what, yeah, mean, this is again, one of the things about doing it differently. This is a fork for us and where we ride. I mean, I live here in the south of France, so the trails are long.

and they're rocky and they're very technical. For those kinds of trails, want the two most important criteria are comfort and precision. And I think for me, that's what we've really hit with this for. me, mean, when we talk, I guess we're getting into 38 versus 35 here, right? And whatever, I think it's good. I think, you know, we have, you know,

Jens Staudt (15:56.718)
Thumbpoint?

Matt Wragg (16:03.094)
We're not going to persuade everyone. A lot of people are really happy with 38mm forks and we're not trying to say you're wrong. It's not saying, again, because we're not trying to make a fork for a million people, we're trying to make a fork for how we want to ride and how we want to do things. We're very convinced with the way they do this. I for me, I don't know if I'd go back to a 38mm chassis now, no matter which plan I rode for.

I you know, I talked to our sales manager, Richard, and he's about the same weight as you. He's 90 odd kilos. And he's, you know, he grew up racing with guys like Loic Bruni. So he's, he doesn't hang around, shall we say, you know, he's riding this fork of 180 mil on a full power e-bike, full chat. And when he starts taking the technical package and working out where we've done the things that on the long descents. the precision, I think that's the most important when we talk about stiffness.

For me, that's the most important metric because, how much stiffness do you need on your bike? It's, you know, who can tell you? Do you need 30 % more or 10 % more or 15 %? I don't know.

We saw that in with carbon wheels to bring a different example and they increase the stiffness over the top, which resulted in a bad riding experience. You lost grip, you lost comfort and the same goes for a 38 fork. And I mean, I'm a heavy rider and I'm not always down to having a 38 mil stanchions on my fork. think there is somewhat of a comfort and you may call it flex and you have an increase in grip as well.

Let's go back to the essentials here. Let's go, okay, well, how much stiffness in a fork do you need? How much is the essential stiffness? And the essential stiffness actually is, can you place the front wheel where you want it every single time? If you start getting noobly steering, if you can't place the front wheel, that fork is not stiffen it. But this is the thing. So at some point, we left this point so far behind that we've

Matt Wragg (18:07.51)
And then you start getting, well, how much chassis flex do you want? Well, that's preference. Getting the wheel in the right place is primitive. How much chassis flex you want, that's preference. But also we come back to the spherical damper as well, the spherical bearing on the damper. If you've got a more consistent response through the strobe, no one really talked about how much does the binding of a damper and the lateral load affect the steering performance? And so if you've got a damper that doesn't bind under load as much,

How much stiffness do you need? mean, it was always one of the things that no one talked about with the 38s. was one of the big advantages is the stiffer chassis means less lateral load for the damper. And I can't quantify for this for you. This, you know, it's one of those things it's very hard to kind of say, well, this is black and this is white. You know, it's more my experience is that certainly I'm 70 kilos. I like to think I'm a good weight and I'm riding on a full power e-bike.

I'm very confident in the feeling I have of the front wheel on my bike. that's probably the, you know, how much more can I say really? You know, and yeah, then there is the element of comfort as well though, cause it's, you know, if you're going through long, you know, I mean, my favorite trail goes from 1200 meters to 700 meters in what one descent and it's, you know, it's all, it's all rocking yield trails. And for that actually, I don't want the big heavy chassis. find, you know, the bent, you know, I

The difference of having a 35 mil Shastian having a bit more compliance over that kind of distance for me is massive. And so when we talk about the precision, you know, how precise can you be if you can't feel your hands?

Also, if you're looking into the trend and everybody is now catching on with upside down forks, I mean, they won't be anywhere near stiffness wise as a 38 right side up. If you want to put it this way.

Matt Wragg (19:56.268)
I'd love to them because they look cool as hell. One of the things we've tried to focus on with this fork is price. One of things we do that with is by not going in too many different directions. To make a really good USD fork is expensive.

You also put a sticker in your box saying, we promise you 10 years of spare parts.

I mean, that honestly came from visiting the factory formula. There's a room, if you go downstairs through on the bottom floor on the right hand side of the building, there's a room at the back of the building where they've just got a wall of drawers. And I was looking at this, it's like, what's that? Oh, you know, we have every part of every product we've ever made. I mean, it's probably not quite that. mean, one of the reasons we put a time limit on how far back it goes, I think it was 2019 and older.

that then means it's the Selva, the Mod, the Cura 4, the Cura and we 100 % know, you know, those we will say yes we 100 % have those parts. If you have an old one break of a 35 fork or some of the older stuff we probably have the

But it's a nice thing to have. And some manufacturers, just like come up with new stuff and then ask you to toss out old stuff if you need a replacement part and you could just repair it. I mean, it's nice to be able to repair it.

Matt Wragg (21:05.409)
Isn't that just a normal thing to do?

Matt Wragg (21:17.836)
You know, it's questions about where the market is, because this is where we'd like to focus on formics. I think the strength of Formula, the real strength is they're great products to live with. You know, I've spent 10 years living with them and I think they're great products to live with. Yeah, my wife will say the Formula forks will always have failure to work on. The brakes, it's little things like both the bleed valves on the brakes are threaded. And for me, that makes a big difference to me that it's really good stuff to live with. also the problem is...

We're not telling you we'll buy a new fork in two years. that's commercially, that makes it more difficult for us. As a small manufacturer, we're not selling the large volumes. We're not saying you have to change next year. I think it's the big challenge for us to try and work out where we fit in the market at the moment. Because I think so much of the market is very much focused on the ultra high end and the most shiny sighting stuff. And that's not really what we do. We want to make...

You we want to make simple, reliable, high performance products. You know, it's at a fair price. That's what it's just trying to find. How do we connect that with people? There's honestly the question is, is that even what people want today? We believe in this. We, know, you, come into meet the team, you know, most people have formula because they like the products. They like the companies, you know, you, untold to formula owners. They tell, know, people had a go, a lot of formula owners, they'll tend to stick with us for multiple years and multiple products. It's, know, it's just.

It's that initial step to get someone into formula. you know, honestly, of the big questions to us in the next two to five years is, is this actually what the market wants? Does the market want what we're giving? Like, you know, for me, what I want is a fork that's a fair price, that works well and keeps working. And that's what I think we're doing.

Well, what I really like about Formula is now with the CTS and you have a product which is fairly easy in setting it up. And then if you are down to like really getting the last percentage out of it, you have the option to go into that. And you not only have the option in the fork, but also at the shock. So there's a broad spectrum you can have and get performance wise from a Formula product in a Formula suspension. Front and rear.

Matt Wragg (23:34.028)
It's the things where you start to understand the realities of the markets these days. You can have an idea that you know is right, you are certain is right, but the question is, does it connect with the public? Does it connect with the modern ways of marketing, the modern ways of selling? And I believe we can. I don't see a reason why we shouldn't be able to do it, but I think we also need to stay open to the possibility that...

I mean, I'm not sure if and when you'll see an electronic product from Formula. To me, that doesn't concern me. I have very little interest in electronic suspension. And I really hope there's people out there like me who don't want that on the bike. You want the simplicity, you want the controls, you know. And I really hope there were people out there like that. know, and I need people and I see people, but it's the one thing you start to learn when, I mean, it's the interesting thing coming from journalism to working in-house is...

You start to, don't know, it's frustrating at times I guess, because sometimes the best idea in the world can be a complete commercial failure. And that's, know, we all know examples of this. I'm just worried I'm going a bit negative here, but it's... The thing is that's what you realise is maybe that's not enough. I'm convinced that, you know, for me like feeling that was enough. Feeling that riding sensation, like I want to keep this fork, I'm happy. Can we connect that to the public? Is that... I don't know. I don't, you we don't...

No worries.

Jens Staudt (24:57.568)
Is there a way to actually for a consumer who hop on the product before buying it? Is there somewhat of a demo program?

You know, I can tell you the demo program would be a great thing, but the question is like, what's the commercial reality for a company like Formula One? You know, and that's actually what it often comes down to is like, well, what do we need to do today? And the honest reality, the honest truth is that some of these, you know, there's so many things you could do, so many things you could try, but you end up having to be really focused because yeah, you know, you have to try and make the things in front of you work before you try the next thing.

And you know, we're such a small team, know, the formulas, you know, there's some administrators and there's the factory and all that behind me, but there's the big factory behind me. You actually start looking this fall for instance, there's Lucas, the engineer, Giancarlo is the head of engineer. San Francesco is the head of engineering. think San Welle, so you maybe got four people on the engineering side who've involved primarily Luca though. Then you've got myself and Simmel marketing, Richard in sales, Eamon.

and Baptiste in commercial and then 12 people. It's not a lot of people to do a lot of jobs. It's one of the challenges with a small company. It's like, do you find ways to take the risk? I think it's one of exciting times of my job is because we don't have the resource to go, well, let's just do a 50,000 euro video.

And yeah, have it, have it from the front page of every major website. We can't, we physically can't do that. And so we have to try and find a way to use the resources we have in the most efficient way possible. And, and that is Formula is an Italian engineering company. And I started thinking, well, how do we show this? And it's, it's not doing videos. It's making products. It's explaining them. It's trying to help people. I think we've made good progress in the last couple of years, and I think there's a lot more to do. And I'm just.

Matt Wragg (26:58.254)
I just really hope people like this fork because I think it's a good one. really do. I've spent a lot of time on this fork and I really like this fork, but also know that just because I like it and I'm impressed doesn't mean it's going to connect when it gets out there. I actually think journalists would do the job better if they understood that fear from this side of what it means to someone. You and I, Jans, we've both written back.

written bad reviews about things in the times because it's the job. now with this experience on the other side, understand now that, because you don't really think about the investment that's the investment that goes into it. I've been writing this forks for a year. We've been taught, the launch has been going around for six months. It's been in development for two or three years. It's so much work goes into something like this. And then you send it to a journalist and if you get a good one.

It's great if you get a bad one and they just go, this is garbage. You that's two, three years of, and it's, you know, you can't control it. It's the chaos. mean, one of the things that they asked about strategy in this is should we even still talk to journalists? And I think you have to, I think you have to accept the chaos that you're not necessarily going to get the results you want. Cause that's how you build, the reviews help people build confidence.

But it's scary and it's emotional and it's upsetting, you know, from this side, the amount of emotion that goes into a launch. I find it really surprising. Yeah.

It's a good thing to explain that we also at Testpilot, we're trying to give the readers or AKA consumers the possibility to test the product. So while the product now is out there and had been launched and you can read about it, you should also take on the possibility to test ride it. And we are doing like what we call co-pilot. So you can reach out to us and then actually get on the product.

Jens Staudt (29:01.056)
and we help you set it up and then you get to experience and then you can actually verify what we found in our testing process about the product and see if we were right or not.

That's very, I like, that's cool. That's very cool. This is what I like about your project. And honestly, since you've told about it, I've told a few people about what you're doing. I'm genuinely very impressed because when I talk, you know, and when we're talking about media models, you know, I think what you're doing is interesting because you've understood where the value is and what you can do and who, you know, where, the value is for. So I think this is one of the, maybe the things, you know, with a lot of the models we see for journalism today, the emphasis of paying goes to the consumer.

Whereas the value for what's been happening is more with the industry. But I mean, one of the disconnects for me, for instance, is I don't think, yeah, I'm not a fan of above the line advertising. Personally, for me, I don't, I've never been convinced to be. I think if you've got a big and broad marketing budget, it's worth having it there. But for someone like us at Formula, where we're limited resources and focus and effectivity, I'm yet to see data that convinces me that it's a solid investment to a company like S.

And so the problem is the company's coming to us and say, well, yeah, the site's going to say, well, will you invest in some advertising? No, because I don't see any value. And it was, you know, and I actually tried to talk to another site before this and look, I'm not interested in advert, but I'd like to support your guys. Can you make me a proposal about how we can do this? So I don't care about that. I don't particularly care about banner adverts on your site. And certainly I do not want to see, I never want to see formulas logo on a popup advert in the middle of the page.

the reader's experience.

Matt Wragg (30:40.17)
Or the YouTube interstitial things like when did YouTube start putting them on every three minutes? You know, I think, this is one of big questions of marketing now that we touched on the last discussion. Right. Yeah. There's a lot of questions about where's the value and how do you connect with people? And what you say about like demo centers. I think that's the next big phase for us at Formula. I think, you know, I don't know how we do it yet and I don't know how we do it with the resources, but how do we go out and start making that connection? How do we get people on the floor that help,

There's practical things like, you know, we have a bunch of good distributors, but the problem is if you go and say to the distributor, can I have the full email list of your shops? You know, that's not such an easy discussion to have. That becomes political and commercial. It's actually, you know, you start finding that like these things that you thought were going to be really simple, you know, you have this idea that let's, you know, let's do them, you know, do this. And suddenly you start going through the practical steps and you're like,

I think it's going be an interesting question for a company of formula size about how can we do that and how do we invest our resources? I would say if I had money in my pocket, I had budget today, I would be going to try and meet people rather than putting it above the line advertising. That would definitely be the way. think technology is going to offer some different things for this. How can we use social media, video? How can we make ourselves available online? those are some of it. I think it's going to be some of the questions for me personally.

Because, you know, I'm here talking to you today because, you know, we had some chats in Formula and we thought I was probably the best person to come and talk to you. I've been the one doing a lot of work on this testing and tuning and development and connecting it to the communication and the market and all that. so this is kind of a new, this is a new phase. Yeah. Talking to you today maybe signifies the start of a new phase in my career. Well, I can talk to journalists, but why aren't I talking, you know, why am I not talking to shops and the general public?

You know, how do we do that? What would that look like? What would that be useful to you then? And it's, there's a lot of questions and so, you know, we want to take a time and try and do it the right way. But I, I definitely think the long-term future of communications is going to be getting close, is going to be getting closer to our users rather than to the media.

Jens Staudt (32:54.79)
forward to be helpful in regards of with getting people on the product and I hope people will actually take that opportunity and then we can work from there.

I think there's a certain amount of inertia around people. People are used to a fork working a certain way, which is why I think it's good that you can just take the fork out of the box and go. I think that's really important. If you had to change a CTS or add Neopost to the first step, I think we failed. I don't think that's a quality you should have in the market. Where one of the journalists said, oh, well, I didn't want to use the CTS system. And so then he marked us down that a fork wasn't very adjustable. it's like, but you haven't used our adjustment system.

and you want to mark us down for adjustability and it's... To me that pose a lot of I think that pose a lot of interesting questions because how are people gonna be when they get this system? You know, what happens when you get the chaos that is the great public? You and I that do this for a living we might be really convinced for CTS but maybe if I, you know, if I go to finale tomorrow and speak to ten people they're gonna tell me to fuck off. So actually maybe what I need to go and do is go and speak to people in finale and understand why they're telling me to fuck off.

One big paradox on in the bike industry is people want to have the adjusters, all of them, and then they turn it exactly once. This same goes for geometry adjustments on the bike. Yeah. And it's just maybe a paradox on of the bike industry.

I think it's the disconnect between the comments and the reality of it. When I say about what commercial reality, ask what commercial reality we're facing. I think if you went and asked people, would you like a fork at a fair price that's good quality and high performance, they'll say yes. when you show them the formula fork with the CTS system, when you actually put in front of them, a lot of the time people will go back to the familiar or they'll try and use it like the familiar.

Matt Wragg (34:47.436)
and then it's not working quite the way you'd... and it's a challenge and it's the way we have to go at Formula. think, because honestly, if we do the same things as Fox, as RockShox, as Olims, as Cane Creek, as DVO, all these brands, I don't notice any of them putting out a bad fork right now. It's not like 10 years ago where this one worked and that one doesn't. Every fork is a good one.

You mentioned it before, you said it's an Italian engineering company. Yeah. And maybe this is a good summary. There are plenty of forks out there and there's no need for another me too product. So that's the reason why formula does things differently. And you have options like the Neopause and the CTS and you have, can use it in a different kind of way. And this should speak to a couple of people.

If we stop and talk to people and take the time, then they go, yes, you know, this is good. know, and that's, think it's the challenges, like, you know, where do you start with that process? Cause you know, practically it starts with one-to-one conversations, but it's then how many one-to-one conversations you physically have until you move on to the next step and how long those one-to-one take to net conversations takes to filter down the line. I don't think it's a secret that it's, it's tough for small businesses in the bike industry right now.

And I think every small business will agree out there that it's a race to try and make sure they can make those connections to be here for the longterm. that's what we're really focused on, like formulas. Yeah, it comes back to tele engineering company. It's a very conservative, it's quite a conservative company in many ways. It's a small family run company. I go there and I sit down with Andrea and Daniela. He started the company, they own the company. Go and have lunch together. I took my dog there for the last meeting.

And the big problem with the dog is I kept losing her because she'd go missing into Daniela's office because she kept feeding her biscuits. That's what that food formula is. When I went there for the first time, we went to this small restaurant around the corner. There's a million of them in Italy. You know the small family-run restaurant in Italy, they have good local food and you know it's always going to be good food because it's Italy. And we had lunch there. Yeah, we had a good Italian lunch.

Matt Wragg (37:02.894)
and they had array of salami on the counter and I was like, oh, well I've had to ditch my wife and my child today so I'm gonna buy her a salami. But I was there at the counter and I was talking to Guy and Daniella comes up and she's like, what are you doing? like, oh well I had to leave miles from my son today so I thought I'd buy her a small present. And she insisted on buying the salami for me because she liked that. And it's a stupid little thing but that's why I work at Fonda because these are the people I work with and these are the people that make the products and...

It's hard to explain that, you know, it's like, you know, people come to the factory and they meet everyone and they love the place, but it's how do we, you know, I one thing I'd like to do, and I don't know if you want to do is I'd like to open the factory up to tours. You know, I'd like to have a site where if you want, you know, if you're in Tuscany and want to come and do a morning go around the factory, you can come and see where the stuff's made and do a video go around the factory. But then you also get onto one of the big questions of modern social media, which is distribution.

And this is the really ugly question with content actually. Because let's say you make your 50,000 euro film and you put 50 grand into the budget. Well, unless you've got distribution, that 50,000 euros is basically flushed down the toilet. So suddenly actually do a 50,000 euro video and you probably need 20, 30,000 to back it up with to make sure people see it. Because if you just put it on your YouTube channel, 12 people see it. know, the algorithms and all, you know, how can a company like Formula

effectively do YouTube because to do it, it's a full time job. So to do YouTube, you need two, three, four, five people working full time to keep the volume of correct content going. And it's just not feasible. I mean, this is the thing, the whole social media and the whole internet dynamic is scaled to more and more and more and more. It is scaled to hyper growth. It's scaled to the start at stars model things. Actually, I used to visit Germany a lot when I was at Pinkbike because I liked German businesses.

because they built them this way. They built them as family businesses who could take long-term decisions about where the company's going. for me, there's not the same pressure. There's not the same bank finance. There's not the same constraints. I mean, I think the modern capitalist model is far too focused on the short-term. And that's one of the reasons why like companies like Formula who can say, well, we'll just, you know, okay, it's going to be a bit tough for now, but we'll be okay in five years if you do this.

Matt Wragg (39:23.982)
You know, it's something I like with Canyon. liked the fact that Roman Arnold bought Canyon.com in what, 1998 he bought it? Yeah. You know, he bought the global domain before Canyon even, you know, writes on day one, cause he was like, one day we're going to do this. So I'm going to invest now. And it's, one of the things I always, I wrote about this a for Pinkbiker. Yeah. I like, I love the way Qde did it. mean, Qde is such a, it shouldn't have worked, but somehow it's this huge.

brilliant company that was the second or third largest bike company in Europe for a bunch of like weird dudes who had no idea. Yeah. And I really like this. This for me is, I feel more comfortable in this world. feel, you know, cause I think if we were in, you know, if you start, you know, how many of the small companies that we love, if we, you get into the merciless US startup culture.

And still a family business.

Matt Wragg (40:16.524)
How many of them would still be with us? Do you think Starling would be with us if they would have to answer the investors every six months? You start to get on to bigger questions about what's happening in our world. At what point does the capitalist model we're in that's right down, that's it's leaving people behind, it's creating mass inequalities and the bike industry is just a microcosm of this. At what point is it going to be the small family companies survive or are they going to be choked out by the

massive conglomerates who have billions and billions in investments in other industries that can just swamp the industry. I think this is one of questions for consumers. It's like, how do you want to do this? The honest truth is it today, we can't be certain it's going to work. I mean, the big companies have so much power, can... I think if I was in their position, I'd probably be doing the same or worse because that's the way my brain works. You get in a position, you optimize it.

know, for someone listening to this, it's a question of what do you want the bicycle industry to be? You know, we all know that if you want something cheap and simple, you order it from Amazon and it's there tomorrow. You know, it's plastic and it's made in China and it costs 99 cents and it'll probably break in a month, but it's there tomorrow and it's easy. How do you fight that? How do you, you know, how do you in a world where consumption is, I'm going a bit deep down the rabbit hole here, aren't I? I may be eating it, put coal in

No.

Boris, well notice, was one of the things just to finish off Sam, but when I talk about us being at a fair price, because I think that's one of the challenges for small businesses, because it's like, it's very easy to make a boutique product for 3000 euros. Well, it's relatively, no, it's relatively, it's easier. Let's put it that way. Okay. You know, if you're going to make something with super, super low unit number, super high value, it's a relatively simple business model. Where it gets harder.

Matt Wragg (42:06.198)
is where we are is where we're in much more the mass consumption. We're not competing with Intend. We're not in that sector of the market. We're probably closer to the mazaki than Intend, we're really honest, with where we are in the market. Peg the price so we're, I think, 1300 euro for. The thing is we still think this is a lot of money. And it's one of the reasons why also we put a lot of effort into value for money. One thing

I do want to talk about before we go is like one thing people don't talk about is what do get in the box? And that's something that, know, because if you buy our fork, it's a 1370 euro fork. You get a mud guard, you get a CTS tool, you get a top cap tool, you get Neopost, you get four coil, you get a shock pump. You know, basically you go and buy some seals and you have everything in that. You know, you have three CTS valves as well, so you can retune your fork.

or you need a few seals and for most people they have everything they need for the first two years. And I think that's one of the things that maybe, you know, in the short term reviews doesn't get covered so much is that, you know, what's it like for ownership?

It's good to have FAMULA as an offering. And as you said, you should look into it as a bigger picture. What's in the box, what you're getting as a consumer and what you're getting option wise. If you're still not there because you maybe are heavier or have a very specific idea of how your bike needs to ride. You can still go and order some additional CTS and go down the rabbit hole of suspension tuning and get exactly the right feel you want.

Exactly. mean, of the things I'd like to do, and I'm basically due to start talking about our shops this week. I would like it if the formula of dealers held a CTS box. The problem is I spoke to a shop owner about this and he's like, I'm not sure I'm doing enough turnover to justify it with the honest answer. And we've had to step back from this a little bit and he's like, yeah, how do we do it? But that's, know, the way I'd like to do this is you go to your like a bike shop, bike shop and say, look, I'd like to try a titanium CTS.

Matt Wragg (44:13.26)
And they, you know, they give it to, cause I think we're trying to change the model a bit. Cause I think at the moment, the CTS box probably isn't the right way to do it. So, you know, if you want the damping, you've got to go and buy 300 euros worth of valves. We're trying to break that. It's just trying to do it step by step. Cause I think that, cause that then puts the effective damper price to six to 700 euros. Yeah. If you want the full range of damping. And the honest truth is that with my experience, I can't just look at a graph and go, I want that one. I want to test a few.

So that's where we'd like to get to, it's all the steps. It's how do we bring the shocks with us? How do we start making these steps? And we're hoping this launch is really starting to move us a lot more in that direction. Fundamental question is how do you make it easy to people? If something's too complicated, they're never going to do it. it's the fundamental challenge of any commercial thing is how do you make this an easy solution? Something we're going to focus on for the next two months.

12 months, so have a look how we do that.

Thank you very much for diving into the product and the new Formula Selva V. And as said, hopefully people take the opportunity to reach out to us, read the article, understand the product, what it offers, and maybe reach out and take a ride with us and maybe hop on the product by themselves. Thanks, Jens. Thanks for your time. Thank you. Thank you very much, man. If you enjoyed this podcast and want to get nerdy, you can subscribe and also download the episodes with Dave Weigel or Paul Aston.

We also have German episodes about 3D printing in the bike industry with Christian Lengvenard from Gravity Components or Saki from BikeYoke. Until next time!

mer receives, to create a reliable product for a long period of writing,

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Speaker 2 (00:46.924)
And I have MadRack here from Formula. You have an update for me, right?

Yeah, we have a new four card, so yeah, exciting times for us.

So Formula is maybe not one of the major, major players. It's a little bit of boutique Italian bicycle product manufacturer. Put it this way.

I wouldn't say boutique. Boutique is high price. We want to try and be fair price, but yeah, is a bit different. I guess that is fair. But I think that's the point, right? If you want to fork works like Fox and Rock Sharks, well, there's two really obvious places to go and get a fork the works like Fox and Rock Sharks, right? What's the point of formula if we're not going to try and do something different?

Couple of years back, I was talking with Vittorio. Vittorio! Vittorio was, he was doing this video series of people out of the bike industry and he was visiting me, made a video about it and he took one quote out of it and he asked me if dual crown enduro forks will be a thing and I said yes and this was actually before the Belva launch and doing things a little bit differently, Formula has

Speaker 2 (02:01.27)
a double crown Enduro fork and Formula has a CTS system, which lets you as a consumer fine tune the damping characteristics of your fork. So there's many, many tiny solutions and ideas within Formula to make a product very useful to a user,

I Formula has been doing really interesting stuff. I I first rode the suspension 2014. I've been riding this stuff for 10 years now. And for me, it always bothered me that I was riding this stuff and I was having really good experiences, but then I wasn't seeing it in the media. I felt like with the quality materials, the brand could be doing more basically. Which is where I started talking with Richard, who is now our...

I'm gonna say sales magic for now because I'm not sure what the structure is but he's basically the top commercial guy in formula now.

But when the first silver had been introduced...

I believe it was 2018. The 35 has been around since like 2013, 2014. so the dampers rough, I the dampers, the dampers at least 10 years. mean, basically this fork we've sent you, that damper is a 10 year old design. You know, we haven't changed our damper in 10 years because, you know, I told the engineers and they're like every time they go back and they're like, well, it works. I mean, one of the things that I think

Speaker 1 (03:28.824)
probably wasn't made enough for the time is we were certainly one of the first brands to use a spherical bearing in the damper. We've had that for 10 years. And I think for me, that's a really important thing. think people talk about friction resistance a lot and it's important, but they tend to talk about it in a stat. If you're doing that on a dyno or in the car park, it only gives you so much information. It's only so much use. If you have the softest fork in the car park,

but it can't maintain that under load, is that useful?

We're talking about the new Selva.

B. Yes, if B-

Speaker 1 (04:10.186)
It's for Vald. Basically we have... I have to check what everyone else is using but I'm confident saying that none of the main players are using the same Vald design we are. We are... rather than using bypass ports, we're using a concentric bypass valve. Please don't ask them how that works. This is where you need the engineers. I mean, the thing that I think is really important to a guy like you and me...

is what does that mean if you're using a valve rather than the port? And the short answer is friction. Because if you have a bypass port in the wall of a... If you have a bypass port, every time the seal passes the bypass port, you create a small amount of friction. So therefore to live without friction, you have to use a bigger, thicker seal. And so by removing the bypass port, we can use a lighter seal on the piston head, which reduces the overall friction of the system.

Couple with that, we're using a floating piston head design. it's actually, the piston itself is controlled by two elastic mounts and there's about, think there's something like a millimeter and a half of float in that to allow the valve to balance. Because this actually, our valve action balances at full extension.

What are the key updates for the Selva V over the former version?

honestly that's the real heart of it is that air spring design. It's a much lower friction design than we were using previously and then we've also updated the lower, you know if you're going to do a lower well you're not going to just copy the old one like you may as well make it a bit better. So this one we've increased the height by about eight mils so basically the overall stack height

Speaker 1 (05:54.574)
is identical to Fox and Rock Shogs now, to be honest, 5mm difference I think it was. We've made it a little bit stiffer, we've got an integrated mudguard and we've got a 180 post mount.

mainly an update on the air side so you also got rid of the the coil supported negative spring?

We've not always, we do have a double airstring, we have the R airstring, we've had that for a while. And that was actually the objective for this fork is we, we still looked at the R airstring and if I'm honest, we just, weren't happy with it. I think in terms of out wide performance, that forks from maybe 2019 and in terms of performance, I still think it's a good airstring, I still think it stands up. The problem was that it's, it's how was it to live with the dual, the dual air design. The practical reality is when I was running that fork,

I was deflating, reinflating both chambers every ride to make sure the balance stayed consistent. From what I understand, that's not something that's unique to Formula. I think it's something that's inherent in dual chamber designs. It's, uh, I think it's hard to have stability. And so the first criteria for this ball, cause we wanted a single valve design, a single valve, all air design that was a lot more stable than the previous dual air design.

We might get a little bit carried away already, but can you maybe explain to the average customer what the regular setup process on a Formula Silver V looks like if you just pulled it out of the box?

Speaker 1 (07:20.642)
Honestly, I think for most people just put some air in and go and ride. Honestly, like, you know, we're going to go down the rabbit hole of tuning, but like we send that fork out with the gold CTS and the Neoplast. And I think I said it's like 70 to 80 % of our users use that. And it's just, it's just a nice, simple fork. It's comfortable. It's responsive. It's, all, I think it's all people need. The thing is going to be is like, what happens if you get there and you go, this doesn't feel quite enough for me, which

is where I am to be honest and I imagine where you'd be Jens, you I don't think a guy like you is gonna want quite, you you're gonna need a bit more, right?

I'm a heavy, so.

Yeah, but you know, it's I think yeah. So what I'd say is like, this is why I was trying to break it down into steps. Because if we have the five levels of vows and neopause, I think we can give you a really logical progression. So let's say you get on the fork with the goal, you get on the standard fork. I mean, you know, I really hope that you're just going to go, this is brilliant. We don't need to touch this. You know, that's the perfect scenario for us, right? But the reality is that some people are get and get on, then, you know, some are going to

The most likely thing they're going to say is I need bit more support in this, which is where I am. For me, the gold isn't enough to how I want to ride the bike. Now, one of the things we want to do with this is we want to actually move away from the compression adjusters because the thing that makes our fork is unique is the CTS. And the problem is if you're starting to use the compression adjuster, you tend to feel the compression adjuster more than you're going to feel the shims.

Speaker 1 (08:58.144)
It tends to be like an overwhelming experience. So if we forget the compression adjuster, what I would recommend is saying, well, if you get on the gold CTS and you say, I need some more, the next step would be the orange. If you get on the orange and say, I need some more, the next step would be the green and then the electric blue. And then we have the purple the other way, which is a fully aggressive valve, which is, I think it's about the limits of how light, you know, how light

Damping to you we could possibly make with this fork and I think the the blue for the electric the electric blue or the titanium I think it is now is Probably the hardest we can make so you have like the two extremes there but so we've got these are five major stops and For me, you know, I get to orange and I'm quite happy But if you say got to orange I went I need a little bit more We go to green and go I need a little bit less then the step there by

we'd recommend is actually go back down to the orange and start adding Neopass instead of using more using the compression adjuster because the compression adjuster it's quite, it's quite a, you know, it's quite a blunt instrument. So it, you know, it provides compression all the way through the stroke. Whereas using the Neopass, it doesn't actually affect the initial straight. And so you can then re you can really increase the mid stroke support while maintaining the same initial stroke performance.

which I think is quite unique to this system. don't think there's anything else like that out there at the moment. And it's a bit more of a pain in the ass. You have to open the fork and put the thing in. It's not the simplest thing. But I think one of the strong things with this is it's very hard to get lost. You've got five major way marks. If you're on the green CTS, you know that if you want to go lighter, you go for the orange. It's a very...

You you're always in balance, you're never going to get the LSC and the HSC out of balance.

Speaker 2 (10:54.734)
There are the NeoPos which are kind of foam tokens, volume spaces. We won't dive into the full detail of it. We may explain that in text, I guess. And you have a pretty good video from Formula where you see it in a transparent chamber, which is getting pressurized and you see the behavior of how it actually compresses under higher PSI, for instance.

I think one of the things that we ought to be more clear about is that the Neopost are consumables. They will break down in a certain time. If you use them for long enough, you'll need to change them. I'd have to double check with engineering. don't know if it's a year or two years, we'd say. yeah, because they're phone, they're consumables. But one of the things for me, I think it's really interesting compared to say TPU, volume space.

I'm still, we're making some TPU volume spacers now because people ask for them. You know, so, you know, our job is if someone's asking, we're going to make it for you. You know, it's, it's, we're a business. But my, my position actually is I don't think they're a great solution because they add friction at the seals. One of the things we have been working on with this fork is reducing friction. So to me, it seems a little bit counterintuitive to do all this work to make a low friction damper.

then put in a space that's going to deliberately increase the friction. think it's, I'd have to get Aiman to double check to explain the physics to me, but it's, I know, you know, I know there's definitely a frictional downside to the TPU spaces. Whereas the, the Neopost there isn't there, they don't increase friction at all. So that's, I think that's really quite a nice advantage. One of the things I've found with this tuning as well is like going to this set of values, I'm getting much more into like a more

I don't want to say linear, because it's not quite the right word, but a much more consistent level of progression through the cartridge. I for me, I think that's the big advantage set. I mean, I'm on the Orange CTS with one neopost in the air spring. And I feel like I've got a set up where the progression of both the damper and the air spring, they feel really matched together. And this is why I've not done much with the progressive stuff. It's in the past. I used to like really progressive, whereas going to this.

Speaker 1 (13:09.388)
Yeah, but having like fairly consistent and kind of match level support for the spring and the cartridge and then using a faster rebound to help it come back to you more gives a fork where you can use much more the travel because I mean, something I didn't realize at first that like, you know, if you make something really progressive, it's very hard to damp it because the damping in either the start and the end of the stroke is so different. So a consistent kind of consistent level of progression like this.

It feels like they're working much more in harmony, if that makes sense?

For the new fork, the old one was interesting because the recommendation PSI for the air chamber was only going up to 90 kilos. Is this increased now?

This was part of the reason for doing this because, you know, if you've got a coil negative spring, you know, it's a coil, so there's physically a hard limit to the riders that can support. And that's why we had the R air spring initially, but again, you know, I've talked about that. that's part of the thing with this. And one of the design criteria of this is that it can support a really high, a wide range of pressures. Yeah. mean, there's certain advantages of doing a simple design like the self-rested coil negative spring. It's a very robust product.

There are limits and we can't pretend they're not. So having a full air spring like this means a guy at 100 kilos, 120 kilos should still be able to find that setting where there's, mean, we work with a guy called Paul Shepherd for UK distribution and he's like a ex rugby fart playing cage fighting valleys lad from Wales. I'm always very nice to Paul, but the point is.

Speaker 2 (14:43.438)
Ha ha ha.

He says it in the clean, he can't ride that spring. That was one of the big things with this, to try and get something because it's not just big riders, it's lighter riders as well. I think if you get down to 50-55 kilos kind of thing, you're going to find the same kind of issues that just isn't the range and the coil negatives.

What kind of travels are available for this fork?

We're launching at 160, 170 at 80s as the native spring lanes. I think we need to do 140 and 150 at some point. it just depends on what people ask us for, to be honest. Part of the decision is we actually wanted to launch this as a Mendeiro fork because for us, is what, yeah, mean, this is again, one of the things about doing it differently. This is a fork for us and where we ride. I mean, I live here in the south of France, so the trails are long.

and they're rocky and they're very technical. For those kinds of trails, want the two most important criteria are comfort and precision. And I think for me, that's what we've really hit with this for. me, mean, when we talk, I guess we're getting into 38 versus 35 here, right? And whatever, I think it's good. I think, you know, we have, you know,

Speaker 2 (15:56.718)
Thumbpoint?

Speaker 1 (16:03.094)
We're not going to persuade everyone. A lot of people are really happy with 38mm forks and we're not trying to say you're wrong. It's not saying, again, because we're not trying to make a fork for a million people, we're trying to make a fork for how we want to ride and how we want to do things. We're very convinced with the way they do this. I for me, I don't know if I'd go back to a 38mm chassis now, no matter which plan I rode for.

I you know, I talked to our sales manager, Richard, and he's about the same weight as you. He's 90 odd kilos. And he's, you know, he grew up racing with guys like Loic Bruni. So he's, he doesn't hang around, shall we say, you know, he's riding this fork of 180 mil on a full power e-bike, full chat. And when he starts taking the technical package and working out where we've done the things that on the long descents. the precision, I think that's the most important when we talk about stiffness.

For me, that's the most important metric because, how much stiffness do you need on your bike? It's, you know, who can tell you? Do you need 30 % more or 10 % more or 15 %? I don't know.

We saw that in with carbon wheels to bring a different example and they increase the stiffness over the top, which resulted in a bad riding experience. You lost grip, you lost comfort and the same goes for a 38 fork. And I mean, I'm a heavy rider and I'm not always down to having a 38 mil stanchions on my fork. think there is somewhat of a comfort and you may call it flex and you have an increase in grip as well.

Let's go back to the essentials here. Let's go, okay, well, how much stiffness in a fork do you need? How much is the essential stiffness? And the essential stiffness actually is, can you place the front wheel where you want it every single time? If you start getting noobly steering, if you can't place the front wheel, that fork is not stiffen it. But this is the thing. So at some point, we left this point so far behind that we've

Speaker 1 (18:07.51)
And then you start getting, well, how much chassis flex do you want? Well, that's preference. Getting the wheel in the right place is primitive. How much chassis flex you want, that's preference. But also we come back to the spherical damper as well, the spherical bearing on the damper. If you've got a more consistent response through the strobe, no one really talked about how much does the binding of a damper and the lateral load affect the steering performance? And so if you've got a damper that doesn't bind under load as much,

How much stiffness do you need? mean, it was always one of the things that no one talked about with the 38s. was one of the big advantages is the stiffer chassis means less lateral load for the damper. And I can't quantify for this for you. This, you know, it's one of those things it's very hard to kind of say, well, this is black and this is white. You know, it's more my experience is that certainly I'm 70 kilos. I like to think I'm a good weight and I'm riding on a full power e-bike.

I'm very confident in the feeling I have of the front wheel on my bike. that's probably the, you know, how much more can I say really? You know, and yeah, then there is the element of comfort as well though, cause it's, you know, if you're going through long, you know, I mean, my favorite trail goes from 1200 meters to 700 meters in what one descent and it's, you know, it's all, it's all rocking yield trails. And for that actually, I don't want the big heavy chassis. find, you know, the bent, you know, I

The difference of having a 35 mil Shastian having a bit more compliance over that kind of distance for me is massive. And so when we talk about the precision, you know, how precise can you be if you can't feel your hands?

Also, if you're looking into the trend and everybody is now catching on with upside down forks, I mean, they won't be anywhere near stiffness wise as a 38 right side up. If you want to put it this way.

Speaker 1 (19:56.268)
I'd love to them because they look cool as hell. One of the things we've tried to focus on with this fork is price. One of things we do that with is by not going in too many different directions. To make a really good USD fork is expensive.

You also put a sticker in your box saying, we promise you 10 years of spare parts.

I mean, that honestly came from visiting the factory formula. There's a room, if you go downstairs through on the bottom floor on the right hand side of the building, there's a room at the back of the building where they've just got a wall of drawers. And I was looking at this, it's like, what's that? Oh, you know, we have every part of every product we've ever made. I mean, it's probably not quite that. mean, one of the reasons we put a time limit on how far back it goes, I think it was 2019 and older.

that then means it's the Selva, the Mod, the Cura 4, the Cura and we 100 % know, you know, those we will say yes we 100 % have those parts. If you have an old one break of a 35 fork or some of the older stuff we probably have the

But it's a nice thing to have. And some manufacturers, just like come up with new stuff and then ask you to toss out old stuff if you need a replacement part and you could just repair it. I mean, it's nice to be able to repair it.

Speaker 1 (21:05.409)
Isn't that just a normal thing to do?

Speaker 1 (21:17.836)
You know, it's questions about where the market is, because this is where we'd like to focus on formics. I think the strength of Formula, the real strength is they're great products to live with. You know, I've spent 10 years living with them and I think they're great products to live with. Yeah, my wife will say the Formula forks will always have failure to work on. The brakes, it's little things like both the bleed valves on the brakes are threaded. And for me, that makes a big difference to me that it's really good stuff to live with. also the problem is...

We're not telling you we'll buy a new fork in two years. that's commercially, that makes it more difficult for us. As a small manufacturer, we're not selling the large volumes. We're not saying you have to change next year. I think it's the big challenge for us to try and work out where we fit in the market at the moment. Because I think so much of the market is very much focused on the ultra high end and the most shiny sighting stuff. And that's not really what we do. We want to make...

You we want to make simple, reliable, high performance products. You know, it's at a fair price. That's what it's just trying to find. How do we connect that with people? There's honestly the question is, is that even what people want today? We believe in this. We, know, you, come into meet the team, you know, most people have formula because they like the products. They like the companies, you know, you, untold to formula owners. They tell, know, people had a go, a lot of formula owners, they'll tend to stick with us for multiple years and multiple products. It's, know, it's just.

It's that initial step to get someone into formula. you know, honestly, of the big questions to us in the next two to five years is, is this actually what the market wants? Does the market want what we're giving? Like, you know, for me, what I want is a fork that's a fair price, that works well and keeps working. And that's what I think we're doing.

Well, what I really like about Formula is now with the CTS and you have a product which is fairly easy in setting it up. And then if you are down to like really getting the last percentage out of it, you have the option to go into that. And you not only have the option in the fork, but also at the shock. So there's a broad spectrum you can have and get performance wise from a Formula product in a Formula suspension. Front and rear.

Speaker 1 (23:34.028)
It's the things where you start to understand the realities of the markets these days. You can have an idea that you know is right, you are certain is right, but the question is, does it connect with the public? Does it connect with the modern ways of marketing, the modern ways of selling? And I believe we can. I don't see a reason why we shouldn't be able to do it, but I think we also need to stay open to the possibility that...

I mean, I'm not sure if and when you'll see an electronic product from Formula. To me, that doesn't concern me. I have very little interest in electronic suspension. And I really hope there's people out there like me who don't want that on the bike. You want the simplicity, you want the controls, you know. And I really hope there were people out there like that. know, and I need people and I see people, but it's the one thing you start to learn when, I mean, it's the interesting thing coming from journalism to working in-house is...

You start to, don't know, it's frustrating at times I guess, because sometimes the best idea in the world can be a complete commercial failure. And that's, know, we all know examples of this. I'm just worried I'm going a bit negative here, but it's... The thing is that's what you realise is maybe that's not enough. I'm convinced that, you know, for me like feeling that was enough. Feeling that riding sensation, like I want to keep this fork, I'm happy. Can we connect that to the public? Is that... I don't know. I don't, you we don't...

No worries.

Speaker 2 (24:57.568)
Is there a way to actually for a consumer who hop on the product before buying it? Is there somewhat of a demo program?

You know, I can tell you the demo program would be a great thing, but the question is like, what's the commercial reality for a company like Formula One? You know, and that's actually what it often comes down to is like, well, what do we need to do today? And the honest reality, the honest truth is that some of these, you know, there's so many things you could do, so many things you could try, but you end up having to be really focused because yeah, you know, you have to try and make the things in front of you work before you try the next thing.

And you know, we're such a small team, know, the formulas, you know, there's some administrators and there's the factory and all that behind me, but there's the big factory behind me. You actually start looking this fall for instance, there's Lucas, the engineer, Giancarlo is the head of engineer. San Francesco is the head of engineering. think San Welle, so you maybe got four people on the engineering side who've involved primarily Luca though. Then you've got myself and Simmel marketing, Richard in sales, Eamon.

and Baptiste in commercial and then 12 people. It's not a lot of people to do a lot of jobs. It's one of the challenges with a small company. It's like, do you find ways to take the risk? I think it's one of exciting times of my job is because we don't have the resource to go, well, let's just do a 50,000 euro video.

And yeah, have it, have it from the front page of every major website. We can't, we physically can't do that. And so we have to try and find a way to use the resources we have in the most efficient way possible. And, and that is Formula is an Italian engineering company. And I started thinking, well, how do we show this? And it's, it's not doing videos. It's making products. It's explaining them. It's trying to help people. I think we've made good progress in the last couple of years, and I think there's a lot more to do. And I'm just.

Speaker 1 (26:58.254)
I just really hope people like this fork because I think it's a good one. really do. I've spent a lot of time on this fork and I really like this fork, but also know that just because I like it and I'm impressed doesn't mean it's going to connect when it gets out there. I actually think journalists would do the job better if they understood that fear from this side of what it means to someone. You and I, Jans, we've both written back.

written bad reviews about things in the times because it's the job. now with this experience on the other side, understand now that, because you don't really think about the investment that's the investment that goes into it. I've been writing this forks for a year. We've been taught, the launch has been going around for six months. It's been in development for two or three years. It's so much work goes into something like this. And then you send it to a journalist and if you get a good one.

It's great if you get a bad one and they just go, this is garbage. You that's two, three years of, and it's, you know, you can't control it. It's the chaos. mean, one of the things that they asked about strategy in this is should we even still talk to journalists? And I think you have to, I think you have to accept the chaos that you're not necessarily going to get the results you want. Cause that's how you build, the reviews help people build confidence.

But it's scary and it's emotional and it's upsetting, you know, from this side, the amount of emotion that goes into a launch. I find it really surprising. Yeah.

It's a good thing to explain that we also at Testpilot, we're trying to give the readers or AKA consumers the possibility to test the product. So while the product now is out there and had been launched and you can read about it, you should also take on the possibility to test ride it. And we are doing like what we call co-pilot. So you can reach out to us and then actually get on the product.

Speaker 2 (29:01.056)
and we help you set it up and then you get to experience and then you can actually verify what we found in our testing process about the product and see if we were right or not.

That's very, I like, that's cool. That's very cool. This is what I like about your project. And honestly, since you've told about it, I've told a few people about what you're doing. I'm genuinely very impressed because when I talk, you know, and when we're talking about media models, you know, I think what you're doing is interesting because you've understood where the value is and what you can do and who, you know, where, the value is for. So I think this is one of the, maybe the things, you know, with a lot of the models we see for journalism today, the emphasis of paying goes to the consumer.

Whereas the value for what's been happening is more with the industry. But I mean, one of the disconnects for me, for instance, is I don't think, yeah, I'm not a fan of above the line advertising. Personally, for me, I don't, I've never been convinced to be. I think if you've got a big and broad marketing budget, it's worth having it there. But for someone like us at Formula, where we're limited resources and focus and effectivity, I'm yet to see data that convinces me that it's a solid investment to a company like S.

And so the problem is the company's coming to us and say, well, yeah, the site's going to say, well, will you invest in some advertising? No, because I don't see any value. And it was, you know, and I actually tried to talk to another site before this and look, I'm not interested in advert, but I'd like to support your guys. Can you make me a proposal about how we can do this? So I don't care about that. I don't particularly care about banner adverts on your site. And certainly I do not want to see, I never want to see formulas logo on a popup advert in the middle of the page.

the reader's experience.

Speaker 1 (30:40.17)
Or the YouTube interstitial things like when did YouTube start putting them on every three minutes? You know, I think, this is one of big questions of marketing now that we touched on the last discussion. Right. Yeah. There's a lot of questions about where's the value and how do you connect with people? And what you say about like demo centers. I think that's the next big phase for us at Formula. I think, you know, I don't know how we do it yet and I don't know how we do it with the resources, but how do we go out and start making that connection? How do we get people on the floor that help,

There's practical things like, you know, we have a bunch of good distributors, but the problem is if you go and say to the distributor, can I have the full email list of your shops? You know, that's not such an easy discussion to have. That becomes political and commercial. It's actually, you know, you start finding that like these things that you thought were going to be really simple, you know, you have this idea that let's, you know, let's do them, you know, do this. And suddenly you start going through the practical steps and you're like,

I think it's going be an interesting question for a company of formula size about how can we do that and how do we invest our resources? I would say if I had money in my pocket, I had budget today, I would be going to try and meet people rather than putting it above the line advertising. That would definitely be the way. think technology is going to offer some different things for this. How can we use social media, video? How can we make ourselves available online? those are some of it. I think it's going to be some of the questions for me personally.

Because, you know, I'm here talking to you today because, you know, we had some chats in Formula and we thought I was probably the best person to come and talk to you. I've been the one doing a lot of work on this testing and tuning and development and connecting it to the communication and the market and all that. so this is kind of a new, this is a new phase. Yeah. Talking to you today maybe signifies the start of a new phase in my career. Well, I can talk to journalists, but why aren't I talking, you know, why am I not talking to shops and the general public?

You know, how do we do that? What would that look like? What would that be useful to you then? And it's, there's a lot of questions and so, you know, we want to take a time and try and do it the right way. But I, I definitely think the long-term future of communications is going to be getting close, is going to be getting closer to our users rather than to the media.

Speaker 2 (32:54.79)
forward to be helpful in regards of with getting people on the product and I hope people will actually take that opportunity and then we can work from there.

I think there's a certain amount of inertia around people. People are used to a fork working a certain way, which is why I think it's good that you can just take the fork out of the box and go. I think that's really important. If you had to change a CTS or add Neopost to the first step, I think we failed. I don't think that's a quality you should have in the market. Where one of the journalists said, oh, well, I didn't want to use the CTS system. And so then he marked us down that a fork wasn't very adjustable. it's like, but you haven't used our adjustment system.

and you want to mark us down for adjustability and it's... To me that pose a lot of I think that pose a lot of interesting questions because how are people gonna be when they get this system? You know, what happens when you get the chaos that is the great public? You and I that do this for a living we might be really convinced for CTS but maybe if I, you know, if I go to finale tomorrow and speak to ten people they're gonna tell me to fuck off. So actually maybe what I need to go and do is go and speak to people in finale and understand why they're telling me to fuck off.

One big paradox on in the bike industry is people want to have the adjusters, all of them, and then they turn it exactly once. This same goes for geometry adjustments on the bike. Yeah. And it's just maybe a paradox on of the bike industry.

I think it's the disconnect between the comments and the reality of it. When I say about what commercial reality, ask what commercial reality we're facing. I think if you went and asked people, would you like a fork at a fair price that's good quality and high performance, they'll say yes. when you show them the formula fork with the CTS system, when you actually put in front of them, a lot of the time people will go back to the familiar or they'll try and use it like the familiar.

Speaker 1 (34:47.436)
and then it's not working quite the way you'd... and it's a challenge and it's the way we have to go at Formula. think, because honestly, if we do the same things as Fox, as RockShox, as Olims, as Cane Creek, as DVO, all these brands, I don't notice any of them putting out a bad fork right now. It's not like 10 years ago where this one worked and that one doesn't. Every fork is a good one.

You mentioned it before, you said it's an Italian engineering company. Yeah. And maybe this is a good summary. There are plenty of forks out there and there's no need for another me too product. So that's the reason why formula does things differently. And you have options like the Neopause and the CTS and you have, can use it in a different kind of way. And this should speak to a couple of people.

If we stop and talk to people and take the time, then they go, yes, you know, this is good. know, and that's, think it's the challenges, like, you know, where do you start with that process? Cause you know, practically it starts with one-to-one conversations, but it's then how many one-to-one conversations you physically have until you move on to the next step and how long those one-to-one take to net conversations takes to filter down the line. I don't think it's a secret that it's, it's tough for small businesses in the bike industry right now.

And I think every small business will agree out there that it's a race to try and make sure they can make those connections to be here for the longterm. that's what we're really focused on, like formulas. Yeah, it comes back to tele engineering company. It's a very conservative, it's quite a conservative company in many ways. It's a small family run company. I go there and I sit down with Andrea and Daniela. He started the company, they own the company. Go and have lunch together. I took my dog there for the last meeting.

And the big problem with the dog is I kept losing her because she'd go missing into Daniela's office because she kept feeding her biscuits. That's what that food formula is. When I went there for the first time, we went to this small restaurant around the corner. There's a million of them in Italy. You know the small family-run restaurant in Italy, they have good local food and you know it's always going to be good food because it's Italy. And we had lunch there. Yeah, we had a good Italian lunch.

Speaker 1 (37:02.894)
and they had array of salami on the counter and I was like, oh, well I've had to ditch my wife and my child today so I'm gonna buy her a salami. But I was there at the counter and I was talking to Guy and Daniella comes up and she's like, what are you doing? like, oh well I had to leave miles from my son today so I thought I'd buy her a small present. And she insisted on buying the salami for me because she liked that. And it's a stupid little thing but that's why I work at Fonda because these are the people I work with and these are the people that make the products and...

It's hard to explain that, you know, it's like, you know, people come to the factory and they meet everyone and they love the place, but it's how do we, you know, I one thing I'd like to do, and I don't know if you want to do is I'd like to open the factory up to tours. You know, I'd like to have a site where if you want, you know, if you're in Tuscany and want to come and do a morning go around the factory, you can come and see where the stuff's made and do a video go around the factory. But then you also get onto one of the big questions of modern social media, which is distribution.

And this is the really ugly question with content actually. Because let's say you make your 50,000 euro film and you put 50 grand into the budget. Well, unless you've got distribution, that 50,000 euros is basically flushed down the toilet. So suddenly actually do a 50,000 euro video and you probably need 20, 30,000 to back it up with to make sure people see it. Because if you just put it on your YouTube channel, 12 people see it. know, the algorithms and all, you know, how can a company like Formula

effectively do YouTube because to do it, it's a full time job. So to do YouTube, you need two, three, four, five people working full time to keep the volume of correct content going. And it's just not feasible. I mean, this is the thing, the whole social media and the whole internet dynamic is scaled to more and more and more and more. It is scaled to hyper growth. It's scaled to the start at stars model things. Actually, I used to visit Germany a lot when I was at Pinkbike because I liked German businesses.

because they built them this way. They built them as family businesses who could take long-term decisions about where the company's going. for me, there's not the same pressure. There's not the same bank finance. There's not the same constraints. I mean, I think the modern capitalist model is far too focused on the short-term. And that's one of the reasons why like companies like Formula who can say, well, we'll just, you know, okay, it's going to be a bit tough for now, but we'll be okay in five years if you do this.

Speaker 1 (39:23.982)
You know, it's something I like with Canyon. liked the fact that Roman Arnold bought Canyon.com in what, 1998 he bought it? Yeah. You know, he bought the global domain before Canyon even, you know, writes on day one, cause he was like, one day we're going to do this. So I'm going to invest now. And it's, one of the things I always, I wrote about this a for Pinkbiker. Yeah. I like, I love the way Qde did it. mean, Qde is such a, it shouldn't have worked, but somehow it's this huge.

brilliant company that was the second or third largest bike company in Europe for a bunch of like weird dudes who had no idea. Yeah. And I really like this. This for me is, I feel more comfortable in this world. feel, you know, cause I think if we were in, you know, if you start, you know, how many of the small companies that we love, if we, you get into the merciless US startup culture.

And still a family business.

Speaker 1 (40:16.524)
How many of them would still be with us? Do you think Starling would be with us if they would have to answer the investors every six months? You start to get on to bigger questions about what's happening in our world. At what point does the capitalist model we're in that's right down, that's it's leaving people behind, it's creating mass inequalities and the bike industry is just a microcosm of this. At what point is it going to be the small family companies survive or are they going to be choked out by the

massive conglomerates who have billions and billions in investments in other industries that can just swamp the industry. I think this is one of questions for consumers. It's like, how do you want to do this? The honest truth is it today, we can't be certain it's going to work. I mean, the big companies have so much power, can... I think if I was in their position, I'd probably be doing the same or worse because that's the way my brain works. You get in a position, you optimize it.

know, for someone listening to this, it's a question of what do you want the bicycle industry to be? You know, we all know that if you want something cheap and simple, you order it from Amazon and it's there tomorrow. You know, it's plastic and it's made in China and it costs 99 cents and it'll probably break in a month, but it's there tomorrow and it's easy. How do you fight that? How do you, you know, how do you in a world where consumption is, I'm going a bit deep down the rabbit hole here, aren't I? I may be eating it, put coal in

No.

Boris, well notice, was one of the things just to finish off Sam, but when I talk about us being at a fair price, because I think that's one of the challenges for small businesses, because it's like, it's very easy to make a boutique product for 3000 euros. Well, it's relatively, no, it's relatively, it's easier. Let's put it that way. Okay. You know, if you're going to make something with super, super low unit number, super high value, it's a relatively simple business model. Where it gets harder.

Speaker 1 (42:06.198)
is where we are is where we're in much more the mass consumption. We're not competing with Intend. We're not in that sector of the market. We're probably closer to the mazaki than Intend, we're really honest, with where we are in the market. Peg the price so we're, I think, 1300 euro for. The thing is we still think this is a lot of money. And it's one of the reasons why also we put a lot of effort into value for money. One thing

I do want to talk about before we go is like one thing people don't talk about is what do get in the box? And that's something that, know, because if you buy our fork, it's a 1370 euro fork. You get a mud guard, you get a CTS tool, you get a top cap tool, you get Neopost, you get four coil, you get a shock pump. You know, basically you go and buy some seals and you have everything in that. You know, you have three CTS valves as well, so you can retune your fork.

or you need a few seals and for most people they have everything they need for the first two years. And I think that's one of the things that maybe, you know, in the short term reviews doesn't get covered so much is that, you know, what's it like for ownership?

It's good to have FAMULA as an offering. And as you said, you should look into it as a bigger picture. What's in the box, what you're getting as a consumer and what you're getting option wise. If you're still not there because you maybe are heavier or have a very specific idea of how your bike needs to ride. You can still go and order some additional CTS and go down the rabbit hole of suspension tuning and get exactly the right feel you want.

Exactly. mean, of the things I'd like to do, and I'm basically due to start talking about our shops this week. I would like it if the formula of dealers held a CTS box. The problem is I spoke to a shop owner about this and he's like, I'm not sure I'm doing enough turnover to justify it with the honest answer. And we've had to step back from this a little bit and he's like, yeah, how do we do it? But that's, know, the way I'd like to do this is you go to your like a bike shop, bike shop and say, look, I'd like to try a titanium CTS.

Speaker 1 (44:13.26)
And they, you know, they give it to, cause I think we're trying to change the model a bit. Cause I think at the moment, the CTS box probably isn't the right way to do it. So, you know, if you want the damping, you've got to go and buy 300 euros worth of valves. We're trying to break that. It's just trying to do it step by step. Cause I think that, cause that then puts the effective damper price to six to 700 euros. Yeah. If you want the full range of damping. And the honest truth is that with my experience, I can't just look at a graph and go, I want that one. I want to test a few.

So that's where we'd like to get to, it's all the steps. It's how do we bring the shocks with us? How do we start making these steps? And we're hoping this launch is really starting to move us a lot more in that direction. Fundamental question is how do you make it easy to people? If something's too complicated, they're never going to do it. it's the fundamental challenge of any commercial thing is how do you make this an easy solution? Something we're going to focus on for the next two months.

12 months, so have a look how we do that.

Thank you very much for diving into the product and the new Formula Selva V. And as said, hopefully people take the opportunity to reach out to us, read the article, understand the product, what it offers, and maybe reach out and take a ride with us and maybe hop on the product by themselves. Thanks, Jens. Thanks for your time. Thank you. Thank you very much, man. If you enjoyed this podcast and want to get nerdy, you can subscribe and also download the episodes with Dave Weigel or Paul Aston.

We also have German episodes about 3D printing in the bike industry with Christian Lengvenard from Gravity Components or Saki from BikeYoke. Until next time!