 The power that you're producing with your legs has to run through your bike's drivetrain before it hits the rear wheel and is turned into forward motion, so it should come as no surprise that the efficiency of your drivetrain is important. But perhaps what is surprising is just how big of an impact it has. This often overlooked aspect of cycling equipment can cost you up to 15 watts or more if you're doing all the wrong things. This video is a continuation of my talk with Josh Portner who's an industry leading expert in marginal gains. If you want to check out the first part of our conversation on tire rolling resistance I left that video linked down in the description below. But in this video we're going to be talking all about drivetrain efficiency. Specifically, which chain loops are the fastest and why? The rather big difference in efficiency between 1x and 2x drivetrains and finally at the end of the video I ask Josh whether oversized pulley wheels are worth the upgrade. Enjoy. Maybe we can move on to drivetrain efficiency. You guys have talked at length about chain loop on the Marshall Gaines podcast. I don't know how many episodes you mentioned chain loop. It won't go away, Hoddy. I love the topic, but Hoddy really became obsessed. I mean, you listen to the show so you know. That guy kills me in every episode. He's like, oh, I want to sneak in this chain loop question. I just worry that we're beating that dead horse. But every single time it comes up, people engage with it. And I would say probably half the questions that we get to our blog are chain loop related. Because quite frankly, it's a snake oil industry. So I think people don't even know where to begin thinking what they should think, which makes it a lot of fun. Yeah, I agree. It's if you were to walk into a bike shop and just see a arrangement of lubes, how you would know which one is the fastest loop on that shelf. If you're just an average consumer, you know, there's no way to tell. I mean, even experienced cyclists don't know. So yeah, maybe you could talk about what what makes a fast loop. Oh, gosh, so that's a really good question. You know, you think of the the mechanism of friction in the chain. So you've got the side plates of the chain, right? And they're press fit with these pins. And then the pin is actually being ridden on by the inner link plates, which are formed in a way that they're kind of have a like a flange stamped into them. And that flange rides around this pin and then around the outside of that flange. There's another piece called the roller. And so you have these the rollers able to rotate on the outer flange and then the inner flange surface rolls on the pin. And so the real mechanism of friction in the chain is primarily at the top, you know, mostly in the top section of chain, where you're the chain is bent or that is articulated at the link. And as it comes off that cog, it straightens under load. And so now you have this movement under load. And then as it gets to the chain ring, it's now bending as it hits the chain ring under load. You have the same effect at the bottom, although under much less tension. But you then have the pulley wheels, right, which is why there's so much obsession with big pulley wheels that, you know, you're coming off the chain ring and then you're articulating your way through the pulley wheels and onto the lower cog. So the key with the lubricant is to get something inside the chain, you know, down into those crevices that you cannot see that will stay put and that will ideally, I mean, in a perfect world, it would keep the metal from ever touching the other metal. And this is why the wax lubes, particularly the hot melt wax lubes are so good. You're able to fully penetrate because you heat the wax until it's low viscosity. You put the chain in there, you shake it around, right? All the air comes out, then you pull the chain and it hardens. And now you have a solid lubricant, you know, incredibly high viscosity exactly in the spot that you need it. And then from there, you know, you can add doping elements. You know, we our technology is a tungsten disulfide nano platelet and a few other things that can actually impinge into the metal and form a harder than steel, it was called like a tribofilm or kind of like a micro surface on the metal surface. And so these are really your best categories of lube. And I mean, even our lube right now, I think, is pretty widely considered to be the fastest thing out there. And also, you know, zero friction cycling. Australia were the lowest chain wear lube by a factor of four in that test. And that's but when you look the second place lube is molten speed wax. And it's also a hot melt wax, right? And as you even just plain paraffin wax, you know, that you would use from like canning, right? That you could find at the grocery store, even that is better than most of the commercially available chain lubes. Now, of course, it's also a pain in the ass because you've got to dedicate a crock pot or an instant pot and you've got to take the chain off and dip it in. And so that's where we get to, you know, all these companies, us included, trying to find ways to get that wax into some sort of drippable, easy application process. But the ultimate goal is essentially the same. It's good that you brought up zero friction cycling because if you go to that site, what you realize is that, you know, maybe maybe you're concerned about losing a few watts. Maybe you're not concerned about it. But not only is it is a good lubricant making your drivetrain more efficient, but it's also extending the life of your drivetrain pretty significantly. Yeah. And I think, you know, it's kind of cool to think how those go hand in hand, right? If you're, you know, metal on metal is the highest form of friction you could have in your chain. And so and it's also the highest wearing. And so lubricants that are eliminating the metal on metal are just naturally going to be fast. And, and, you know, once you get to the very low wearing lubricants, your losses really become all about the viscosity losses at the surface. And penetration, I think, is the other topic that people don't think about. You know, there's some really fast lubes out there, you know, squirt and smooth or two that really come to mind that, you know, if you apply squirt or smooth with heat or you immerse with it, they're unbelievably fast. But the problem is, if you're applying them in any temperature below probably 80 Fahrenheit, they they're too thick to actually get down where they need to be. So you can make your drivetrain rather quiet because it fills up the the spaces in the plates, but it never gets all the way into where it needs to go. And so you never realize the low friction or the chain wearing benefits of it because it doesn't penetrate. You know, I think that was the that was the problem we set out to solve with our super secret product early on was like, OK, well, we know this category of lubricants can be really fast under the right circumstances. But, you know, if you the consumer have to get a hairdryer out to warm your drivetrain to apply it, you know, you're not going to do it. And so you're you're likely never actually realizing the benefits of that. And so, you know, that's really focused on the penetration side of the problem. Yeah, definitely. I've used the squirt, Lou, and I use a super secret when I'm racing and I need to re lube mid race, sometimes literally while I'm riding the bike, I'll I'll try to lube while I'm racing in these long gravel races. That becomes important. I usually just go for squirt because if I use a lower viscosity lube, it seems to squirt out and and not very much of it gets on my chain. But that that higher viscosity, I can kind of control it a little bit more. I mean, is that mid race when my chain is super dusty like that? Is is throwing squirt on it? Is that useful? It's honestly hard to say the the penetration challenge there is real. And so, you know, what you're really doing is you're you're killing the noise, which certainly is going to be good for your mental state. But, you know, there's very little lubricant that's actually going to be making it down to the pins where it needs to be. You know, the other risk with doing that mid races, you know, especially with an application like squirt or really anything you put on it that's a liquid, the act of putting it on the dirty chain and trying to like rub it in to get it in there, you're actually kind of pushing dirt into the chain. You know, I think that's when we've struggled with for a long time. You know, is it better to try to put an oil based lube on because we know that can penetrate, you know, I would say all of the really good, effective wax lubes now. You know, I'd say the three top drip waxes right now are our products. Super secret, the ceramic speed UFO 2.0 and there's one out of Finland called Rex that's quite good and that and will actually penetrate the chain. But all of them have this like a drying period of of, you know, a couple of hours. Right. So, you know, I think in in what you're describing, you know, squirts probably as as good a solution as any. But, you know, I know in the testing that we've done to kind of look at it, other than eliminating the noise, you're not you're not doing exactly what you think you're doing, if that makes sense. You know, you're not you're not really lubricating the chain in the way that the chain needs to be lubricated. You know, quite frankly, I think at that point in the game, the reduction of noise and making yourself feel better is probably the biggest benefit of the activity. So, but yeah, you know, hot, hot melt wax, you can easily, you know, get 200 miles out of a good hot melt wax. And even if you start to hear the chain, what you're generally hearing is the side plate rubbing. And because, you know, you think of the mechanism of pushing hot wax out of the chain, the because it's in there as a solid over time as the chain is articulated and you're shifting and, you know, the when you shift or your cross chaining, you know, the the chain is going from straight to kind of like angled laterally. You're you're squeezing the wax out. It's actually one of the, you know, the real benefits of hot wax is it stays so clean on the inside because it's kind of forever purging itself. And as it purges itself, it's taking the dirt out with it. But the beauty of the hot melt is that even once your chain starts to get a little noisy, that's typically because you've dried or you've pushed out the stuff in the side plates. There's still stuff deep in the chain that's now going to have to work its way out. And so, you know, a slightly noisy hot melt chain can still be way more efficient than you think. It would be compared to other, you know, like if you have an oil based lube and you start to hear your chain, you know, it's it's gone. There's nothing in there. There's nothing in there because it just moves, you know, it moves so freely. When we we talk drivetrain, we didn't talk about, you know, one of my pet peeves, which are these small cogs, small chainring, like one by drivetrains, right? Using a 10 tooth cog is throwing away like three ceramic oversized pulley setups worth of watts. You know, and people justify it on a million grounds. Oh, it's lighter and it's this and it's, you know, and it's simpler. And I can get the wide range and the difference between a 10 and 11. I mean, it's it's like two watts per tooth down there. I mean, you know, there's some some cassettes that have a nine now. And the nine I think is like 2.6, 2.7 watts less efficient than the 10, which is two watts less efficient than the 11. I mean, you know, it's like I just got oversized pulleys, you know, coming out my ears like, you know, you get a pulley, you get a pulley. You know, we're just we're just pissing away watts for no reason. And you know, yeah, but that nine tooth cog is light. Well, it's what half a gram lighter than a 12. I mean, and you don't like one by drivetrains because there's more cross chaining and that makes the chain less efficient. Is that correct? No, I personally, I don't like one by drivetrains because I feel like it's the worst of all the worlds, right? You're always in a smaller chainring than you probably need to be in. You're always using a smaller cog than you probably would for efficiency. And you have these large jumps in between cogs. And so for flatter to rolling terrain, you know, all of my one by experiences that and of course, you know, coming from an old roadie who, you know, like literally see that, like, you know, that's like a 12, 21, right? But I think growing up the way I did, I mean, even, you know, learning like step gearing and some of these other techniques, one by to me just feels like you never, ever have the right gear, right? It's too big, too small, too big, too, you know, I mean, it's just never there unless you really get lucky. But yeah, from an efficiency standpoint, you know, got charts and data that we could certainly certainly look at on this. But, you know, you're you're just always in a higher state of friction in a one by setup, then you would be in an equivalently geared two by setup. So it's like a 4810 is the same as like a 5312. But there's the difference there. It's like a watt at the chain ring and two watts at the cog. So you're, you know, again, I've just thrown away another oversized pulley system in my setup. But then as you shift across the range and you look at them equivalently, they, you know, they never converge. I mean, you're always less efficient in that one by setup than you are there. And the argument I think often becomes, well, you save the weight of the front derailleur and the chain ring, and it's more aerodynamic because there's no front derailleur and chain ring. But the whenever I've looked at it, which has been a number of times, the arrow savings of losing the front derailleur and chain ring are almost always offset by the increase in derailleur cage length required to handle the chain from that, the huge steps in the back. Right. And so you're, you know, you're getting rid of like one bit of of unfortunate frontal area from the bike, and you're just adding it back somewhere else. So, you know, at best, your arrow improvement is maybe a water to, well, you're always and everywhere losing three plus watts in the efficiency. And, you know, when we, all the testing on that, the kind of universal standard there is 250 watts. So, you know, you think of the times where you really need it. You're actually losing a lot more. You know, you crank it to 500 watts for a two minute climb to try to break a breakaway apart or something, you know, those are some real losses. Yeah. And so, so for me, I generally advise against one by, you know, I think one by is brilliant for mountain bike, where it really allows all sorts of fascinating things to start happening in the suspension that previously was like, oh, we can't put a pivot there because we've got this derailleur and all this other complication. I think that the other thing with the mountain bike is that because the terrain is varying so much, you're never just cruising along and thinking, ah, this gear is too high. But when I switch it lower, this gear is too low and I can't find the right gear, the terrain is constantly going up and down. So that's that's not really crossing your mind like it is on a road bike or even a gravel bike. Oh, agreed. Yeah, agreed. I mean, there's I think of, you know, there's sections of unbound where, you know, it's like, as far as you can see, it's the same thing is happening. And for me, like the mental, the mental drain of not being able to find the right gear, knowing that I'm going to be on this thing for, you know, all the way to the horizon is just crushing. And, you know, that's back to the placebo effect. Is it really like, is there some physiological thing happening in my body that's that's defeating me because I'm too high or too low a cadence? Probably not, but mentally. Well, you know, actually, there may be. I mean, I don't know if there would be enough of a physiological effect going on if we're talking about the difference between one or two RPM too high and one or two RPM too low. But they have done studies where they've had people ride at a cadence that's higher than they're used to and a cadence that's lower than they're used to. And then their preferred cadence and almost always they come away with the conclusion that the preferred cadence is the fastest. I like it. I would agree. It certainly feels that way. You mentioned oversized pulley wheels a little while ago. It's obviously a very expensive upgrade for what it is. What are your thoughts on oversized pulley wheels? Is it is it hype or is are there real gains to be had with those? Both, actually. It's, you know, oversized pulley wheels, I think, are probably the. Truly, I think probably the best self marketing product our industries ever come up with, right? I mean, you know, I, to my knowledge, put the very first ceramic bearings in bicycle wheels ever back in 2000. We we were actually contracted to build Jan Ulrich's Olympic wheels for the 2000 games. They had sent us a set of these tune hubs from Germany to build the wheels on. And they were just gravelly and nasty. And so a friend of mine from college was working with a bearing manufacturer here in the States, and he was told me stories of these amazing bearings that they were using in these like space shuttle fuel pumps. And so I was, oh, man, that that would be a really cool story. And so we, you know, get these thousand dollar bearings and put them in the wheels. And, you know, and then we started selling them in zip wheels. I think around 2001. And, you know, we just thought it was a cool story and maybe a little bit of a gimmick. But, you know, it saves point eight watts over a set of wheels, very cool. And what we didn't really realize was how many people would want to buy them if only there was like a signal to their buddies that they had them. And so, you know, we started, we started putting like a sticker on the hub that was like, you know, ceramic inside. And that really boosted the sales. And then, you know, when ceramic speed came out, I mean, they were really, I think, got the branding and the marketing. But, man, what cooler way to show that you've got something amazing and expensive than to make it giant and in your face and in a red, you know, like some some color. So, you know, the reality there is that I mean, the best oversized pulley systems on the market are probably saving you somewhere in the order of one to one and a half watts, you know, if your derailleur is two years old and you've never maintenance it and, you know, it's full of dirt. You might save two watts, but but for the money for the four, five, six hundred dollars, I mean, it's it's not the most cost effective savings. But they do look cool. When I think about what World Tour teams are running, the only team that I can think of that runs oversized pulley wheels is the Israel Startup Nation team. I think they might have a partnership with ceramic speed. And that's the reason is the reason why they're not running oversized pulley wheels. Is it just sponsorship agreements? Oh, it's kind of all the above. Yeah, you know, yeah. And so we like we actually work very closely with Israel. What are they Israel Premier Tech now? I just we just burned a bunch of HX one tool kits for them like, oh, that's their new logo. Yeah. So they they have a very factor has a very tight relationship with ceramic speed. And, you know, typically if you're going to put the oversized pulley system on a wheel, you are going to upset some sponsor or another, you know, Shimano and Sranboth don't don't like that. And so, you know, that's typically you're going to be put in a situation of, oh, well, now you have to buy these components instead of being on the sponsor side. You know, I think, too, it adds further complication for the team mechanics. You know, back to our, you know, our logistics problem, right? It's, you know, these guys crash a lot. The bikes get damaged. They fall off car. You know, I mean, it's just these bikes live a very, very difficult life. And, you know, if you've got a $500 oversized pulley on a bike that gets laid down, it's now an hour of some mechanics life to, like, remove that thing to try to put it on the next derailer. That that's an often surprising one for people. I mean, unzipped jersey to zip jersey can be three or four oversized pulley systems worth of losses. So I like how we're using oversized pulleys as a as a unit of measurement. Now, yeah, yeah, I like to joke about that a lot is like a currency. But because it's a fact, you know, I think it puts it in a great place for people. It does because those things are really expensive. So, you know, if you're going to drop that much money on an oversized pulley wheel, you should probably think about these other things as well. I would say the last biggest marginal gain to point out really is just the general bike maintenance thing. And it's it's often the topic nobody really wants to talk about because it's a pain in the butt, but you can do all the right things and buy all the right things. And you can quite literally undo all of that hard earned money spent by not maintaining the bike, right? I mean, those ceramic bottom bracket bearings, you know, you know, they are not very fast after you've ridden them for six months in all sorts of rain and mud and they're full of crap. And, you know, like they're not doing what you think they're doing. And same thing for the the oversized pulley system, you know, if you're not taking those pulleys out and flushing those bearings and relubricating them and putting them on every I mean, really like like I would say month. I mean, I people don't like when I use those short time periods. But, you know, all of these really fast bearings of all the brands, one of the things that makes them spin like they do right when you buy it. I mean, all the, you know, the ceramic speed setup is brilliant. You spin that pulley and it just well, it can do that because there's no seal contact in the seals, right? The seals are really shields that look like seals. And that means that every time you ride in the rain or the mud, all sorts of God knows what can get in there. And so, you know, if you're not flushing those bearings and cleaning them with a fairly high frequency, you know, I mean, at the pro level, I mean, it's literally like every rainy ride you should be flushing and relubricating your bearings. And if you're not doing that, you really do start to give a lot of those savings back. And then over time, you can see degradation in those parts that, you know, once the races are scratched and there's been enough, you know, that the dirt gets in there as like a lapping compound and it starts to erode the metal races. You know, over time, you can absolutely end up in a spot where you're very expensive, oversized pulleys or bottom ceramic bottom bracket bearings or whatever are actually slower than the bearings you replaced with them, because those bearings are slow because they're sealed and full of a higher viscosity grease. But if they're clean, you know, if they're not full of dirt, they may be faster than what you're now on. And so I think that's that's probably the biggest piece of info that I would say people want to hear the least, but probably need to hear the most. Thanks for watching. Josh has informed me that he wants to offer a discount on all silica products, including the lubricants that he talked about in this video to you guys. So if you want to take advantage of that, be sure to use the code Dylan at checkout to get 15 percent off. Wow, you really thought you were going to get away with leaving me out of another video? Unbelievable. At least I caught you during the part of the video where we're pedaling products because Hypergain Beast Mode Mask Gainer Raw Edition. If you enjoyed this video, be sure to give it a like, subscribe and share it with your cycling friends. I'll see you in the next one.