THE WHEEL DEAL

Thursday, May 21, 2009

The world of harness racing is about to be quite literally revolutionized by a new innovative world-class racing wheel. Produced by the same award-winning engineer that designed and produced Hayden Roulston, Sarah Ulmer and Alison Shanks’ world record breaking and Olympic medal winning bikes, these new harness racing wheels are also designed to win races and shatter records.

Harness racing has taken time to embrace new technology, with owners and trainers focusing heavily on the horse’s performance rather than the equipment used. More recently, attention has started to switch to making technical improvements to shave vital seconds off race times.
However, producing a fast harness racing wheel is technically challenging. For optimum performance, the wheels need to be not only highly aerodynamic and exceptionally light, but also able to meet the stringent strength tests set by HRNZ.

Enter Milton Bloomfield, world-class bike designer and renowned expert in composite materials, who has produced equipment that has allowed athletes to break multiple world records, and win World Championship and Olympic medals in both cycling and yachting. Earlier this month Bloomfield’s exceptional abilities were recognised by the ‘Outstanding Individual Contribution’ award at the national PWC Hi-Tech Awards 2009.

With his sophisticated understanding of aerodynamics, and years of experience using composite materials to produce ultra light and strong bikes and wheels, Bloomfield and his engineers have applied their skills to the design of a revolutionary harness racing wheel.

The Zen Strike wheel is a convex solid disk with the most aerodynamic shape possible, as determined by extensive testing in the University of Canterbury’s wind tunnel. Made with high modulus carbon fibre and built on the finest high-speed hubs, the new wheels will give great acceleration and have an exceptionally high spin speed.

Bloomfield was introduced to the harness racing opportunity by Thomas Mitchell, a 19 year old commerce student and the son of trainer David Mitchell. After inspecting the American racing wheel imported by Mitchell, Bloomfield said that he was “confident that our new Zen Strike racing wheels will be as much as 30% more aerodynamic than spoked wheels”.

The new Zen Strike harness racing wheels will be launched on 30th May to coincide with the Harness Jewels event in Ashburton, and will be available for sale directly from Dynamic Composites and online at www.zenstrike.com.