Rapid rubber

We step inside Specialized's S-Works Tyre Factory to see how it keeps making pro riders faster

- Words Rob Weaver Images Nils Laengner

There aren’t many bike brands making their own tyres, let alone racing them in the Tour de France.

Specialized, however, are one such business who regularly go toe to toe with companies that make tyres and nothing else. What's more, their sponsored riders, using their tyres, frequently win.

So, how do Spesh compete with the tyre giants? The S-Works Tyre Factory, in the small town of Lage, Germany, is the key to answering this question. It’s the American brand’s tyre innovation centre, delivering small batches of special tyres for special riders - sometimes in under 48 hours.

Behind closed doors

Drive into the quiet industrial estate and you'd be hard-pressed to pick out the building that houses the S-Works Tyre Factory. There are no flashy signs or telltale giveaways - in fact it’s so unassuming, it's almost covert.

This is Specialized’s first tyre innovation centre. While it’s been here for 10 years, it’s only more recently that the brand have been able to produce tyres from start to finish in-house. And, while there are only seven people working at the facility, they’re able to produce 5,000 to 10,000 tyres per year. That may sound like a lot - until you hear that a specialist manufacturer such as Continental can pump out around 10 times that number... per day.

The point of the S-Works facility isn’t full-on mass production, though. It’s to turn around small batches of prototype tyres quickly and create the best-performing tyres possible for the fastest racers in the world, whether they’re on tarmac or dirt. Interestingly, the first product that Specialized produced was a tyre, way back in 1976.

Back to today, and information learned at the factory is then shared with suppliers so that production tyres can be improved, whether that’s through refinements to the manufacturing process, changes to the rubber compounds or tweaks to the overall structure.