- And I thought, okay, I'll make my own shoes, why not?
- This is the moment where I'm just like
how do you even begin to start with the shoe?
(intro music)
Right tech lovers,
we're lucky today because we're joined by Adam Hansen
of Lotto Soudal.
And well, he's a guy who I've not stalked specifically,
but I've been really interested in his career,
particularly because he's an absolute tech lover.
And well, a big thanks to him because well,
you're about to get ready to go on the team presentation
here at the tour Down Under, aren't you?
So I don't wanna keep you too long
but I do in a way because I wanna pick your brains
about so many things.
So I've got a few questions here.
But firstly, what's your background in cycling,
for everybody watching?
Well in sport wise, I did a lot of basketball, running,
triathlons, duathlons, mountain biking.
I wasn't very good at cycling in the triathlon scene,
so I tried a year's cycling in Austria
to improve my bike leg.
And then from there,
that's how I came into the cycling side.
- Now were you always into technology?
I guess a crude way of saying it
is like do it yourself or DIY
because when we look at some of the things,
which you've done in the past,
you're a great craftsman.
Was that always something
which you were doing before you were cycling,
or did you always have a keen interest in it?
- Well I used to love pulling things apart,
seeing how things work.
- I bet your parents hated it.
- Well in the end, they liked it,
because I fixed everything round the house.
So that was good.
But I was into software
so I was a programmer before I was a cyclist.
And I did a lot of evaluation software.
I used to work for Herron Todd White
property valuers in Australia.
And then from that,
I went into also real estate and renovations.
I was buying flats, renovating them,
and I did all the plastering, painting,
wood floors, everything myself, that side.
So as a do it yourself person,
I was always into things like that, yeah.
- And then you managed to I guess
carry that over into cycling
because on Weight Weenies, a forum,
that's where I first heard about you really,
when I was reading your posts and everything like that.
You were able to just transfer your love I guess
for handiwork into actually making your bike,
well, unique to you, let's say.
- Oh for sure.
Like back in the Weight Weenie days where
we could do anything,
use any bike equipment you want,
and the goal was to have the lightest bike you could get.
And I remember once, I drilled out a (inaudible),
just drilled holes all through it.
- There's people at home crying now.
- And I'd get the chain rings,
I'd drill them out also,
anything to save weight.
Used titanium bolts.
I even used plastic bolts,
like in the bottle cages.
I made my own bottle cages, lighter ones.
I would try and ...
Just even putting handlebar tape on,
don't put it too close to each other.
- [Jon] Yeah, really tight as well.
- [Adam] Yeah, yeah, less of it.
So anything to make a bike lighter.
- Your cleats on your shoes,
I'm pretty sure they're quite far back, aren't they?
- [Adam] Yeah.
- And I remember once, racing against a guy,
I think from Switzerland,
and he showed me his shoes.
And he had drilled them in the center of the sole,
and I asked him why.
This guy must be crazy, like why would you do that?
And he said to me, "Jon, if you were gonna kill a rat,
how would you kill it?"
And I said, "Well I don't know, with a trap."
He said, "No, no, with your foot."
And I said, "Well, in the middle of my foot, I guess,"
because you wouldn't do it on your toe.
You'd wanna ...
And he say, "Yeah, that's where your power's coming from."
And I was "Yeah, I guess so."
And then when I saw your shoes,
which I was sure were in the middle,
is that the same thinking behind that,
is that you can get more power from that part?
- Well it's a bit of both things.
First, they say with the running foot,
you push most of your power with the ball of your foot,
which is true.
But in a cycling shoe, we have a rigid sole,
and people forget that we really
have a rigid sole in cycling.
So this sort of defeats the purpose on that side.
My theory on it is that the more weight
you have over the crank,
the easier it is.
So to work out watts, for example,
it is torque multiplied by the cadence,
and that equals your watts.
And when you first had an SRM,
you had to calibrate them ages ago.
You did this formula.
I used to know it off by heart years ago.
But you had to put five kilo weight and you
put a new crank length in the formula,
and it works out the slope number,
and you had to enter into the SRM
and then that'd work out the crank power.
And for me, it was like okay,
crank can support it.
And it wasn't, you wouldn't have to have it in the formula.
And it's like when you're taking a nut off a ...
And I always say this as an example.
If you're gonna take a nut off a wheel of a car
and use a short spanner,
it's super hard.
But if you have a longer one that will reach,
it's much easier.
So with having your cleat further back,
it puts your foot more forwards,
and you're having more weight over the crank.
So when you're standing up,
it's super ... well I don't wanna say it's super easy,
but it's much easier when you're climbing-
- You're letting all your secrets out now.
- It's much easier to apply the torque.
So in low cadences, yeah, if you're more forwards,
for me, I believe it's much better.
- Yeah.
Now sticking then with cleats,
I mean this is the thing which amazes me,
because we spoke off camera just now
and while I'm a self-confessed lover of shoes,
both normal shoes as well as cycling shoes,
and your shoes, they blow me away.
I've just picked them up and,
well, I couldn't believe it,
and the cameraman, he couldn't believe it.
He nearly passed over, not because of the heat,
but because of the weight.
Because there is nothing to them.
They are like 70 grams of hair or something like that.
So you hand make your own cycling shoes,
which for many people out there,
they won't be able to believe it,
but you do.
What made you initially go down that route and why?
- Well this goes back to the weight Weenie days
where I always wanted to have a light bike,
and I always wanted to have super light shoes.
And at the time, I was riding DMT shoes,
and they had the three Velcro straps,
and this was really good.
And then as shoes progressed,
they started having a ratchet system.
And I couldn't have the ratchet system
because I have a bone sticking out of my foot here.
And that's where the ratchet system used to be.
So I used to get pain.
So I'd always have to be on the Velcro three straps.
And that top model sort of died off
and then I sort of ran out of options
what type of shoes I had.
And I really liked the DMTs because-
- They were DMT Radial, I think.
- Yeah, yeah.
- Yeah, I liked them.
I like really simple shoes, yeah.
But anyway, sorry.
- But what you could notice is,
I used to gut them,
I used to take ...
because there was a few layers on the inside,
I used to take all the layers on the inside-
- All that like very soft padding.
- Yeah, so I'd take all that out and then with the sole,
I'd change the inner sole also,
and I think I lost maybe 40 or 50 grams
just from inside of the shoe,
and you couldn't tell it.
And when I pulled the straps over,
anything that wasn't on the Velcro,
a couple of straps short and everything
to make them lighter.
And I always just wanted a light shoe.
And then they stopped producing them.
So I ran out of options then.
And I thought okay, well,
I'll make my own shoes, why not?
- This is the moment where I'm just like
how do you even begin to start with the shoe?
- Well it definitely was not easy.
It took me I think three years,
and I'm not gonna say three solid years.
It was like okay, well I'll give it a go.
Can't be so hard.
And it was a lot of research and a lot of trial and error,
and the idea was just to make the sole
and get someone else to make the top.
And the other things I had,
I had inner soles, and my inner soles were 120 grams each.
So they were super heavy, just for the inner soles.
- Was that like orthotic ones?
- Yeah.
And so my idea was okay,
I'm gonna make my soles based off my inner soles,
so then I don't need them,
and I save 120 grams there,
and I just make the top.
I'd get someone else to make the top and fabric.
So I made a mold of my foot in my inner soles,
so the shape of my foot is directly
in the position it should be in,
by the orthotics.
And then from that, I used this wax over the top,
because when you use the epoxy with plaster,
it gets absorbed and then you need a separator.
So it's like a release agent,
this special wax that I use.
And then I had, as you call it,
like a plug of your foot.
And then I made basically some flanges around it
to make a mold from that.
And first, I made the sole of a shoe.
And I went to someone to make the top
and they took way too long to do this.
So I thought okay,
it can't be so difficult to make the top also.
And the problem with carbon fiber is it's super stiff,
well, it's the epoxy.
So I tested with different agents of resin,
and I could make the epoxy more flexible.
So the top layer of my shoe,
if you have a look,
you actually see it here, where there's a join here.
And this part of the shoe here is actually flexible.
So that's flexible.
It's actually really flexible.
And the sole is, as you feel here, as hard as a ...
It's very stiff.
- Yeah, there's no movement in there, is there?
- And the way I got my shoes so light,
and if you look at a few examples like the Bont shoe,
it's called the bathtub design.
Right, so the side walls create the stiffness.
So if you have a look here at this defined line here,
and my sole goes all the way up there and it goes around.
So my sole actually goes over the top of my foot.
And that's where I get the extra stiffness.
So by adding extra layers of carbon here,
I can reduce the layers here.
And you see the line here, they come through here.
So all the carbon's on the outside of the shoe.
And then here, there's almost nothing.
And you can actually push in there, like on a bike frame,
you know, when you push on top shoes?
You don't need stiffness there
and you don't need stiffness there.
And all the stiffness is through the side.
So that's how I get the stiffness
and it remaining so light at the same time.
So the top half uses a different type of epoxy
to the bottom part,
and that's the flexible one.
This is the nonflexible one.
And the other ways to make it lighter,
I don't have the metal bolts.
- [Jon] Yeah, that's right.
What's that, Kevlar, is it?
- That's Kevlar carbon.
So what I do is I do have the metal bolts in there,
at the start,
and then I make it set up, everything right,
then I use a glue gun and I glue it in place.
I take the bolts out
and then I thread it with carbon Kevlar,
and then I put epoxy on there
and then it's fixed and that stays on forever.
Other things I did,
I used to have a [inaudible] system here.
- I remember that, yeah.
- Years ago.
And then I went for a Bola system at the back.
And now I do a 3D printed thing on my 3D printer,
where it just wraps around there,
add different knots, different tensions there.
- [Jon] Just pull it through.
- Yeah, so I just pull it through, hook it in,
and I feed it through there.
That was 2.7 grams.
The Boa system without the bolts
and without the bolts in the shoe,
was 11 and a half grams,
and I think there was like 15 grams there.
So I saved 12 grams just with that there.
With this here, I saved 27 and a half grams,
and I just try everything possible to minimize the weight.
- Yeah, now did you have ...
Before you were making your own shoes,
were you putting cleats further back than normal?
- Yeah.
So I re-drilled the shoes also.
Now I have them a little bit more forwards,
because when you have them too far back,
you do lose a lot of cadence.
And if you have them too far forwards,
okay, you lose a lot of torque,
but you have ... more flexible in the ankle,
where I'm just trying to find a midpoint.
And the strange thing is, if you look at cyclists today,
a lot of cyclists have the cleats all the way back
in their current shoes.
So everyone is going a bit further back.
It's a bit easier.
It's less stress on your Achilles also.
And it's more safe
if you're a bit unsure where to have your cleats.
- Well I used to actually do something similar
to try and get a little bit further back,
using a speed play adaptor,
and actually filing it out and ...
Well, Dremel, and yeah.
You know where I'm coming from.
Now if I said to you,
and this is a dream by the way,
if I said to you, "Adam, I'm gonna come over,
I want a pair of shoes."
Imagine that, but for yourself in seriousness,
how long does it take you from start to finish,
now that you're up to skills with it,
because the first pair was what,
three years you said?
- So to do all the molds and everything,
it's about 14 days.
But once the molds are done,
I can do it in five days,
but it's only one hour work every day.
So it's one hour there
and then you've gotta wait 24 hours for it to cure,
then it's another one hour job with the epoxy,
then it's 24 hours to cure.
So yeah.
- Right, I've got another one then.
Stiffness of a sole,
does that make a big difference to power output?
It is recordable, I guess,
because I remember ... it's probably in my mind.
I mean us as cyclists,
we spend a lot of time on our own, don't we, riding,
and all sorts of things go through our mind.
Oh, the soles are too stiff.
My feet are hurting because of that.
I always thought I'll get the stiffness sole possible
because you're not gonna lose any power,
and I just wanna know your thoughts on that
after making your own shoes.
I'm sure you've done all sorts of different soles.
- So with mine, I always want the lightest,
and sometimes I go too far,
and I can feel that they're too soft, and I won't use them.
So I definitely have some pairs ...
I have a training pair that are bulletproof,
where I feel confident I can throw it at the wall,
it won't break.
These ones I race nationals with.
These are eight months old,
so they've done quite a lot of racing.
I get goosebumps if I drop it.
Because if I drop it at the wrong point,
where the carbon's super thin,
they will break.
Stiffness with these,
these are the borderlines.
I would not make these any more lighter than this.
I do have a white pair that I use here on the sprint days,
and they're stiffer.
Not by much.
Let me say it like this,
these aren't flexible enough not to use them,
if that makes sense.
- So you're not gonna compromise your job on your bike,
are you, by having something-
- Sure, no.
- I still can't get over them.
- Well yeah, I say they're light and people are like,
"Yeah, light," but when they pick them up,
it's like it's paper.
- They genuinely are so light.
And now I know that you're scared of them being dropped,
I don't wanna touch them.
- Actually, I don't like people touching them.
- Oh really, do you not?
- Yeah, I have a special case I put them.
- I feel awful now,
because I'm like "Oh let's have a look."
- No, but sometimes I'll leave them there.
I have teammates, they wanna try them.
- Oh right, okay, yeah.
- And you see it, it's really ...
Like you see the ball of my foot here.
You see my bone sticking out here.
Like this part here.
It's really for me.
People say "What size are you?"
I'm like, "No, no, you're not trying them on."
Like I'll go to a photo shoot or something, come back,
and I'll see somebody like trying to put his foot in them.
Like "Don't."
- No, stop.
- "No, don't."
Yeah, it's not like that.
So yeah, these ones are ...
Like in my suitcase, I've crushed a pair a few times.
- Oh no.
- Yeah, so I have a special place in my suitcase
that I made from fiberglass to put them in there,
so they're safe.
And yeah, I always watch them, I always carry with them,
I never leave them here.
I always take them to my room.
Because the light ones, yeah, they're very fragile.
It's like an eggshell.
- Yeah, I mean they're incredible.
Are you still fixing your teammates' bits and pieces,
as well as other riders,
because you're quite well known for that, aren't you?
Sort of the go-to guy.
Like the TV doesn't work in the Bahrain-Merida bus.
Adam can fix it.
Are you still the-
- It's not the nicest thing sometimes.
- No, exactly.
It's alright if it's your team but the others,
it's "Oh no, I can't fix it.
Sorry lads, you're gonna have to be stuck with-"
- When someone breaks the screen on their phone,
they always take it to me,
"Can you fix the screen?"
Like "Yeah, I'll do that."
- I've heard you're good at that.
- Yeah, yeah.
Adam Blythe's asked me if I can wrap some things,
because I wrap my shoes,
I used to paint them.
Now I wrap my shoes.
So the white ones are wrapped now.
They're wrapped because ... well first,
when you put your shoe in, it opens this way,
and the paint used to crack.
And that used to always annoy me.
So I use car wrap,
so all my shoes you see that are white,
I just wrap them.
And Adam heard I had some wrap,
he goes, "How much wrap you got?
Can you make my shoes more white?"
I'm like-
- It's all he cares about.
- Yeah, so I did some wrapping on his shoes.
Yeah, if something goes wrong
or they can't work out installing some application
or the computer has a problem,
I get the knock on the door.
"Is the office open?"
"Yes, the office is open."
- Yeah, it's 3 am, come on.
Brilliant.
Adam, thank you so much for your time.
I'm aware that there's riders milling around behind us.
When we started in here, it was quite empty,
and now, there's all sorts of people gathering around,
ruining our beautiful shot.
But no, thank you so much.
It's been absolutely brilliant
and I can't wait for us to sit down again and chat,
because it's always insightful and I learn so much,
and it just makes me
want to pester you more and more and more
about technical stuff.
So there we are.
Let us know your comments for Adam,
because who knows, maybe in the future,
we'll be able to hook up again
and I'll try not to take up too much of his time,
but we wanna know your questions.
And also, remember to like and share this video.
Don't forget, check out the GCN shop.
And well, we did a suitcase tour with you once upon a time,
didn't we, yeah?
- That's right, yeah.
- Yeah, so if you wanna check out that
to see exactly what goes on tour with Adam, it's amazing.
Yeah, I'm not going to ruin the surprise actually.
Click just down here.