Lightweight wheels

The high-end hoops that embody the best of German engineering

- Simon Smythe

Starting life in a garage is not necessarily a barrier to a company’s success: look at Apple, Google and Amazon. But the Munich tractor garage where Heinz Obermayer and Rudolf Dierl made Kevlar parts for sulkies — horse-racing carts — in the 1980s, was an impossibly humble beginning for the legendary carbon wheels that would be ridden to World Championship and Tour de France victories by Johan Museeuw, Jan Ullrich, Lance Armstrong and, most recently, Team Ineos.

The story goes that Obermayer and Dierl, engineers who were interested in sports cars and horse racing but not bicycles, accepted a bet that they couldn’t make a bike wheel.