Mavic has responded to VeloNews editor in chief Ben Delaney’s account of an R-Sys wheel failure that left him with a broken shoulder, and I can’t say it exactly gives me confidence in the folks running the show over there. It’s PR at its worst, as in “Pretty Ridiculous.”
The Mavic folks may be taking their cue from aviation safety agencies, which seem to favor “pilot error” when it comes to plane crashes, the pilot being quite safely dead and unable to recount how the port wing suddenly fell off when the fat guy in 10A farted. That’s not the case here — Ben lived to tell the tale, and so far it does not have a happy ending.
Or perhaps Mavic is riffing off the USA Cycling Event Release Form, which is chock-full of variations on Dante’s “All hope abandon, ye who enter here!” Phrases like, “I acknowledge that by signing this document I am assuming risks and agreeing to indemnify, not to sue and release from liability (pretty much everyone who ever walked the earth, save your own dumb ass).”
My personal fave, “cycling is an inherently dangerous sport,” makes an appearance, as do “equipment failure,” “the possibility of serious physical and/or mental trauma and injury, or death,” and the crème de la crème, a curtain call by the promise to waive, release, discharge, hold harmless, indemnify and not to sue even for “claims arising from the releasees’ own negligence.”
All this is the long way around to saying, “Shit happens,” which is cold comfort indeed when you’re slumped in the ER with a busted shoulder and a ruined bike. Shit does happen — if it didn’t, lawyers, PR flacks and other non-essential personnel would be hunting honest work.
But you can minimize your exposure to risk, just like USA Cycling’s releasees, by refusing to buy — much less race on — stupid-light equipment like Mavic’s once-recalled R-Sys wheels, a pair of which weigh just 310 grams more than a single Excel Sports Nimbus rear wheel with a 32-hole Open Pro rim, 14/15g stainless-steel spokes laced in a 3x pattern, and an Ultegra hub.
You feel the urge to shed a little weight, take a good dump the morning of race day. That way your shit-happens moment is already behind you.
• Late update: Good Lord, reading skills have deteriorated; attention deficit disorder is a pandemic and the sound of lips moving positively deafening for those of us who make our meager livings via the written word. Some participants in the VeloNews.com forum are castigating Delaney for failing to contact Mavic before writing about his experience with their high-zoot wheelset. His original story clearly states: “In the days and weeks following my accident, I had numerous phone and email conversations with Mavic staff. Five Mavic representatives traveled to Boulder to investigate further.” Um, I think Mavic was aware of Delaney’s concerns, y’all. Fail. See you again next semester.
Mad Blog Media 
Gee, Patrick. It looks to me like their lawyers wrote that stuff.
If I decide to get another set of aero hoops, I will buy them from Neuvation.
Now, that’s funny
I’ve been in Mavic’s shoes, in another industry. Their response did fall short. Mavic doesn’t really know yet what caused the failure, and they think there might have been other causes. Maybe the wheel, maybe frame catastrophic failure, maybe the tire/tube combo. But at this stage, pointing this out just comes across as denial.
So the appropriate response at that point in the damage control cycle is to, in this order, express sympathy for Delaney (even if he sticking the knife in and twisting), swear to get to the bottom of it, point out the possible causes, swear again to get to the bottom of it, and conclude with sympathy for Delaney.
Then they need to find the cause of the failure. Maybe it was the wheel, maybe the frame, whatever. It’s not enough to prove that it wasn’t their wheel. That will clear them legally, but kill them in the court of bike geek public opinion. They have to determine the actual cause, even if it wasn’t their product.
Poorly handled, it won’t just affect their sales of their super duper wheel set, but will be an across the board hit for years to come. Properly handled it can make them the pre-eminent experts in high-tech wheels for all of bikedom (we know wheels, we know them so well look at what we did when there was a questionable failure. WE are the experts and others are just posers).
Hope it works out. I’m sticking to my 64 gen-yoo-wine DT stainless spokes.
What strikes me as strange (or just lawyerly) about that letter from Mavic is that they don’t seem to know the proper names for the various tubes in a bicycle frame. For instance, “the bike frame had broken on the main tube” and “the horizontal tube under the chest of the cyclist is broken.” If they’re trying to look knowledgable to an audience that knows bikes, this isn’t a standout effort.
Anyway, I’m off to inspect the under-bum tube of my bike now, just to make sure everything’s on the up-and-up. The under-chest tube looks good, though.
The last thing Mavic needs is to allow their wheelset become the Ford Pinto of the cycling industry. (I drove one of those “exploding Pintos” back in grad school). But agree with Jon–show respect for the injured, and quietly solve the problem of what broke and why.
Let’s forget WHY the wheel failed and concentrate on the fact that it failed catastrophically. Even if no one had been injured, you do not want a product to fail in a catastrophic manor (i.e. explode). If personal safety is involved, you want something to fail in a much more progressive manor so that a failure will not cause injury.
My career is in building structures. The codes for new construction are littered with provisions to avoid catastrophic failure. This wheel is an unsafe design because when it fails it does not do so gracefully.
Here’s my favorite part of their CYA response: “Fact: The frame is made of carbon…. The fork (also made of carbon) is not broken and shows no evidence of scratches or impact.” As if simply stating that the frame and fork are carbon is enough to cause the reader to doubt the integrity of the frame or fork, and therefore make the reader suspicious of these parts. Hello! The spokes were made of carbon too!
Also, had they actually read Delaney’s original article they would have found that the fork does show evidence of impact: it’s marked up under the crown from when the fork dropped down onto the tire.
Maybe this is one time they would have been better off keeping quiet until they had something of substance to say. As Abraham Lincoln once said, “It is better to keep one’s mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and resolve all doubt.”
Their statements ring a weeee bit shallow to me…. Shearing of the nipple of the tube and the separation of the tire from the rim could easily be achieved by the forces expected as the wheel disintegrated. I would expect that instead of a complete initial failure of the wheel, likely one spoke failed which then rapidly led to the destruction of the rest of the wheel. As this happened the wheel ovalized as more (most likely opposing) spokes failed. This may have taken a couple of revolutions to complete during which time the other damage to the tire and tube happened. I would also guess that the frame was taken out in the crash… Just a wild ass guess for fun. But my day job is as a Mechanical Designer and my night job deals with owning a bike shop. Between the two I’ve been exposed to mechanical failures of all types.
I have a funny feeling that the letter in Velonews was written by the legal department – aka Avoid Paying Money Department.
Rush Carter
CS West Bikes
Yeah, I don’t know what they’re thinking, or if. That sure isn’t the letter I’d have sent to a dissatisfied customer. And mine don’t even get injured when a gag goes sideways (unless you count the psychic toll). The thing reads as if it was written by a Mavic Respond-O-Tron 2000 Customer Service Droid with a bum wiring harness and a low battery.
Okay not to be to defensive of lawyers, but…. the following seems to indemnify the waiver:
“You feel the urge to shed a little weight, take a good dump the morning of race day. That way your shit-happens moment is already behind you.”
In essence, the racer (aka user) is ultimately responsible for whatever happens to them. And thus, the company who manufactured the said product is not responsible. In other words, you sign up for the even with dubiuos product on your bike, and it breaks, you are screwed for claiming you got hurt using crappy products.
It is a major bummer that Ben got hurt, but from the sound of it he had replaced some of the spokes before (as these were second generation spokes), so he was racing on something that he SHOULD HAVE known was faulty. Therefore, he is responsible. It sucks for Mavic that their lightweight, carpet-fiber wheels blew up, but Ben’s injuries are a large price to pay to prove what most people already know: there is a thing called “stupid light” and these wheels seem to fit that bill.
I can’t fault Mavic for trying to look at all of the factors, but making Ben (or the customer) solely responsible for the failure is POS service. Sadly for those wanting to see a quick resolution, I think Rush Carter has the ‘real’ result closer to what happened than anyone at VeloSchnooze or Mavic wants to admit.
I know what wheelset I won’t be buying the next time I need one…but then I gave up racing years ago.