It’s not an “official” 23.5mm, that’s what they measure out at. They made a narrower internal rim so the team could use narrower tires. It got lost in all the noise about the “return to hooked”, but it isn’t the hooks that gets that wheel/tire in line with the regs, it’s the internal width.
If that’s what the teams - and more importantly, customers - want, that’s what people will ultimately get.
Just fwiw, if you ask the folks who qualify to have opinions on this stuff, you definitely won’t find anything approaching universal belief in the “rule of 105”.
I get that, but I think we are missing the forrest for the trees… For whatever their reasons, UAE did not want to run a 30mm tire or 29mm tire like other teams. They did their testing, and decided for themselves that the 28mm was their best performing tire. They wanted to run it on the ENVE 4.5 wheel, but that would have been illegal because of the new UCI rules. So, ENVE had to create a special 4.5 wheel that could be compliant with everyone’s needs, probably including higher pressure too. So, ENVE ended up with hooked rims.
Teams at that level tend to copy each other, or at least investigate and assess what each other are doing. If they reach similar conclusions, that a true 28mm tire is better than the compromise 29mm tires that a few tire manufacturers offer (including Continental that UAE runs), then they will want the same from their wheel manufacturers.
If the wheel manufactures like Zipp copy ENVE and go back to a slightly narrower hooked rim to meet their teams aero and tire combination requriements, then Hookless is dead [for road wheels].
Here’s a look at the TdF wheel suppliers and who went hookless. Do you really think we will see a shift to Hookless in this group, given UCI’s rule? The other mega proponent big boy is ZIPP, and they’re probably sitting on their newly introduced hookless NSW wheels thinking “well crap, we’ll never sell these.”
- Black: Hooked
- Bontrager: Hooked
- Cadex: Hookless
- Campagnolo: Hooked
- DT Swiss: Hooked
- ENVE: Hooked (and Hookless for some)
- Miche: Hooked
- Newman: Hookless
- Princeton CarbonWorks: Hooked
- Reserve: Semi-Hooked
- Roval: Hooked
- Shimano: Hooked
- Swiss Side: Hooked
- Ursus: Hookless
- Vision: Hooked
- ZIPP: Hookless
I think it’s more than fair to suggest that hookless is probably “dead” for road racing wheels. As per the suggestion up thread that people actually listen to what Josh said, he’s very clear that he’s talking about road racing wheels.
While this category of product is incredibly important for the people on this particular site - and for those racing UCI road events - it isn’t what’s paying the bills for a lot - most - of the bike industry, and for most people that are actually buying the products that they make it simply doesn’t factor into their decision making at all.
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Yes. I guess should have been more clear. I think Hookless is dead for road wheels. I will edit my recent above post. I fully agree that gravel and MTB wheels will continue to be hookless until the sun cools.
But the entire context of this thread is road racing wheels, so I figured my comment would click in to that.
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Replying in general to the thread - I have a split stake in this discussion as I have both hooked and non-hooked road wheels.
But in a weird case of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon I had this topic come up at work recently. And I think it’s an example of the cautions around hookless.
A coworker got into road cycling about a year ago with little or no cycling “nerdiness” as we’ve coined it here. He bought a used bike and has been riding around all year.
He was telling me about an adventure he had doing a granfondo. While he was midway at a rest stop his tire just “blew off the rim while sitting in the sun” After a few attempts at reinflation he said it blew off a few more times. Eventually he figured out that he should just put less air in. Apparently he did and rode the last 100km of the ride.
So I ask him:
Are your rims hookless?
I don’t know…what does that mean?
What did you inflate the tires to?
60 or 70. Until they were hard
How big are your tires?
30 or 40 or something like that
He eventually took his wheels into a local bike shop. Only to find that he was running 40s that specifically said “Do not run on hookless” on hookless rims. And inflating the tire to the max PSI of 65 that was stated on the tire.
He had ridden this bike thousands of miles with this combo and appears to have finally hit the recipe of disaster (temp, PSI, hookless, wrong tires). He was even more confused that no bike shop had ever said anything when he brought it in for a tune up.
I don’t really know if hookless is dead. I’ll keep riding my 404/808 setup but I’m a nerd with PSI meters who looks at the weather when I decide what to pump my tires to. But I have to agree with the general sentiment that if hookless means that you have to be a bike nerd to be safe - then something has to change.
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As long as the major bike brands are shipping with hookless wheels, I am not sure you can quite sign the death certificate.
I ordered a bike that came with a set hookless. I didn’t have an option and they were not expensive when bundled with the bike. At the price I ended up paying for them, I’m ok with them. To buy them retail would be criminal. They will end up on FB marketplace, so I guess I’m a criminal 
I bet the overwhelming majority of people don’t know the ins and outs of hookless. They say “well they are Zipps, they must be good”.
Especially when they have been pimped in sponsorship, media…
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Of these 4 bullets, #1 is factually correct.
#2 is also currently factually correct, albeit there have been instances this season where teams have been running non-compliant setups in races.
#3 may well be correct, although not necessarily applicable to every race
If #1 to #3 are all true, #4 cannot apply. There is not currently any way to make a 25mm internal width rim compatible with a 28mm tyre under ETRTO guidelines (regardless of whether the rim is hooked or not). There was a grandfathering catch-all statement when the guidelines were updated in 2023 saying that if a rim had previously been certified as compatible by the manufacturer then it would continue to be so. However, AFAIK the UCI has not adopted this element.
Hence the introduction of these “29mm” tyre sizes
This is my exact scenario. I didn’t really want hookless, but the build I wanted came with 404/808 setup. But, as we’ve noted - we’re nerdy enough to even know this stuff before ordering a bike
This is true today, but the change will begin with the wheel makers, not the bike brands. If the wheel suppliers shift back to hooked, then the future bikes will come with hooked.
If I ordered my preferred tri bike today, it would come with hookless wheels. I do not want them and would delay ordering or look at a custom speck that can sidestep hookless. But, next year or so, the landscape may be vastly different. ZIPP is probably the most screwed, given their all-in commitment to hookless and no Plan B.
Today, only a tiny number of pro teams are using hookless, and at least one pro team wheel sponsor is moving back to hooked. If Lotto and Movistar tell ZIPP they want to run 28mm also, what do you think ZIPP will do?
The point of my #4 statement is that ENVE specifically made a wide ERTO-UCI-UAE-compliant wheel that made everyone happy and optimally supported 28mm tire. UAE did not want to run a 29mm, because that was sub-optimized to them. To UAE and ENVE, the only way to achieve a wide wheel that could run a 28mm tire and be best aero and CRR to them, was a hooked design.
I edited my post above to put a tilde in front of the 25mm to indicate 25mm-ish, not exactly 25mm.
Honestly? Zipp will almost certainly tell them that they’ll take it under advisement for the next design cycle, and that they’re out of luck for next season. Lead times on stuff like this are a lot longer than people think, and the teams aren’t driving the bus nearly as much as people think. Those two teams certainly aren’t. Frankly, the tire size that Lotto has to run doesn’t even make the same page of the wish list as “who can we get some money from to keep this team alive”.
I know for a fact that at least one pro tour team went with a wheel sponsor that was a lot slower than the difference you’re talking about here when compared with their previous season’s wheel simply based on the size of the check that came with the slower wheels. And that was the smart decision. Amount of sponsorship $ available is the single best predictor of Pro Tour level success.
They are allowed to run that tire on this new wheel because of the inner rim width. Period, end of story. Hooks have nothing to do with it.
Perhaps those vestigial hooks do actually make a difference in terms of tire retention, but that doesn’t enter into the permissability of the combination in any way.
It is interesting to note how ready people are to accept on faith the idea that these tiny little bead hooks make a tangible difference, when the only evidence of that is the word of the same company(ies) that people are slamming over their “bad faith” promises in re: hookless.
Go figure.
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Random question, my Reserve 53|64 wheels support 28-35mm tires. Should I go with 28 or stay with 30?
What is your use case ? (tri or road cycling)
Tri
Albeit that if you leave everything else unchanged with the rim design (i.e. external profile), if you add a hook to your rim, you inherently reduce the inner rim width by the depth of the hook as the measurement is taken from the inside of the hook, not the inside of the rim wall.
So adding a hook to an otherwise marginal inner rim width could bring you closer to ETRTO compliance.
Absolutely, but it’s not like this is a technicality. The inner face of the bead hook is what the tire sidewall indexes on, in the same way (or, well kinda… it’s complicated) that it indexes on the inner wall of a hookless rim.
Well… ENVE was all-in hookless and had a perfectly good 3.4 Hookless. They could have just dialed back the mold and made a narrower version that would be legal for a 28mm tire with very little R&D. But they didn’t…
A couple key things here…
- In one of the many articles, I remember reading that UAE wanted to run higher than 72 PSI. So, that is probably one of the driving reasons for those hooklets.
- UAE said the 28mm was their desired fastest tire, and that was based on both aero and CRR. So, if they wanted a rim that was 1.06% wider than the tire, then the only way they get that is either:
- Get ENVE to make them a rim with 23.5mm interior and extra thick sidewalls, or
- Invest some R&D and design a skinnier rim with the hooklets.
That is precisely what UAE did with ENVE, and look what happened. ZIPP cannot afford to look inferior to the other top tier wheels if hooked or hooklets is believed to be the fastest thing in the pro tour. ZIPP makes their money selling wheels to the mongrel masses, and the if mongrel masses wants to buy what they believe to be the best wheels that the fastest riders are using, then ZIPP might need to change the bait.
Sure. Seems pretty clear that what UAE wanted was the driving force behind these wheels.
Zipp ain’t sponsoring UAE, or any other team that has the pull that UAE does. UAE clearly has written into their contract that they can use other wheels if they’re found to be faster. They’ve done so on numerous occasions, and they’re one of only a couple of teams that have the star power and budget necessary to pull that off. If you’re sponsoring a team like that, you kinda know what you’re getting into, and you do what you have to.
Was Enve’s other team at the TDF even on the new wheels? Sure didn’t hear anything about it if they were.
If this is where new wheel designs wind up going, the other companies will follow suit, but they sure as hell aren’t going to cut new molds so (lol) Lotto can have the latest and greatest. That’s a team that probably goes away completely if their rumored merger falls through.
If history is any guide, it’s kinda funny to think that Movistar would even be on the ball enough to ask for something like this. Their riders are probably grateful they don’t get stuck with tubulars.
I’ve been saying this for years. I am closer to being a nerd than not. And had a bike shop put non hookless compatible gp5000 on my zipps. At the wrong pressure… Only to find out a couple of weeks later. There was zero information on the tyres, and zero information on the wheels. On zipps web site you had to work really hard to find out, and couldn’t find anything in contis web site. Of course, the bike shop, which was a Scott official dealer had received no training in the matter. When there should be warnings all over the place, as there is a life hazard at stake.
To me the bike industry has been highly irresponsible, to the point of being criminal. And I don’t understand how the media had gone along with the flow.
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It’s kind of funny,
A year ago we were debating all this and after the “they are lighter”, “they are more aero”, “they are…” got shot down, it was “ya, but Pogi won the TDF on them”. Fast forward one year and we find out that Pogi was actually saying he wanted more pressure . And here we are.
There are teams who know they are at a competitive disadvantage in very specific stages. But like most teams, sponsorship $ is what keeps the team alive so they shut up and put down a few more watts. I have hear this directly from the performance director of one of these teams. When I said that, I got the “Pogi would never compromise”. I guess that was true 
And let’s be clear, we are not talking megawatts, these are marginal gains (or losses). And if used correctly, we are not talking about safety issues, there are a lot bigger safety issues than a tire blowing off when used properly.
A year ago when when I first heard of the Enve hooks I wondered how they would present it. I think overall they did as good a job as could be done. Nothing wrong with them refining their strategy for very specific wheels. One day I hope to try a set of Enve
I am really curious to see where Zipp goes. I suspect no change, if any until their next iteration of disc/858/808…