"Hookless tires are a scam": claims a former technical director of Zipp

In an interview on a podcast, Josh Porter, former president of the Bicycle Wheel Technical Committee, former technical director of Zipp, former consultant for several professional cycling teams, and currently CEO at the component firm Silca, made some harsh statements regarding hookless rims on the road.

The controversy over hookless rims in road cycling continues

Porter was clear when talking about hookless wheels in response to a listener's doubts on the podcast who asked about the possibility of using a 25mm tire on a set of Hunt wheels. "zero performance advantages and a safety risk". That's how Josh Porter expressed it.

To further deepen the wound, Porter pointed out the brands that have entered the manufacturing of hookless rims solely to reduce production costs as conscious culprits.

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According to Josh Porter, hookless wheels not only fail to achieve aerodynamic benefits but are actually worse due to the need to use a wider tire for a certain rim width that already needs to be wide to deal with the low pressures required by the system. These tires end up having a greater effective width than the nominal width given the reduced support that hookless provides on the sides, causing them to slightly widen compared to if they were used on conventional tubeless rims.

He also pointed out the narrow margin of error left by hookless rims, while noting that in laboratory tests he has seen tires unseat with just 78-80 psi (5.3 - 5.5 bar) when the maximum pressure set by ETRTO is 5 bar. A safety margin that is too narrow and may be behind falls like the one suffered by Thomas de Gendt last year and that triggered an investigation by the UCI which resulted in the obligation to adhere to the standards set by ETRTO, in fact, shortly after that incident, Vittoria launched their tires in size 700x29 to comply with this requirement.

On the other hand, brands like Zipp defend the benefits of the hookless system. While they admit that it is cheaper to produce hookless rims, they indicate that this system allows for lighter and more impact-resistant wheels.

However, on the other hand, we are seeing how brands like Orbea with their new range of Oquo wheels or a former advocate of hookless like ENVE in their new SES 4.5 PRO are opting for the so-called minihook in their latest products, rims with minimal hooks on their sides that improve tire fixation and, at the same time, have the advantages of hookless in terms of simplicity, lightness, and robustness.