A couple of months ago, Factor unveiled a collaboration with every teenage boy's dream car brand, Bugatti.
If social media is anything to go by, the bright blue Factor One derivative was clearly a hit. Based around the brand's wide-forked aero bike, it featured an even more unusual fork design, high-end components throughout, and a set of never-before-seen wheels.
Those wheels, which showed a Black Inc logo and the number 62 - denoting their depth - were similar to the brand's existing 62 at first glance, but on closer inspection, housed some significant upgrades.
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They were laced with deep-bladed carbon spokes, an interesting carbon fibre hub flange, and a massive plain weave carbon fibre rim wall finish that put me in mind of an old-school Felt bike, or a chess board for that matter.
As it transpires, they are to be known as the Black Inc Hyper 62, and are today being made official as a new, even more premium level of Black Inc's deep-section aero wheels.
According to the brand, they are not just another deep-section wheel, but "a wheel with greater ownership over the elements that define performance."
That obviously sounds like marketing talk 101, but I include it because the underlying meaning behind it points to a detailed approach. Factor's - well, Black Inc's - engineers focused on the architecture of the spokes, the rim, the integrity of how the two were bonded together and how the spokes bond with the hub, the aerodynamics, the stiffness, and of course how they rode, to find improvements across the entire wheel.
The outcome is a 1298g wheelset at 62mm deep, with a 23mm internal diameter and a hooked bead.
Stiff, light, aero, pick three - just don't ask for cheap
Factor says the Hyper 62 wheels are designed to find a new sweetspot between low weight and deep rims, where ride character and lateral stiffness weren't compromised in the pursuit of weight and aero targets.
To achieve this, among other things, the brand developed its own proprietary carbon spokes rather than relying on existing third-party suppliers used by competitors. This allowed it to control the spokes' shape, layup, stiffness and strength, which all contribute to the ride quality offered by the wheels, and allowed the brand to design the wheels as a whole system, rather than designing the rims and hubs to work with predetermined spokes.
The spokes are then bonded into the hubs using another proprietary component in the form of the hub flange. This is deeper than you'll find on most wheels, adding strength to the system and, according to Factor, distributing the load more evenly, in turn allowing an equivalent performance with lower mass.
The third proprietary feature is found at the other end of the spokes, and the hidden threaded tips, which are integrated into the rim to aid aerodynamic performance.
And elsewhere, the rims themselves, while 62mm deep like the existing Black Inc 62 wheels, feature a TexTreme outer layer, which is what creates that checkerboard finish. This is more than a style choice, though. Factor says it offers extra stiffness to the rim wall, ensuring structural integrity under load with a lower overall mass.
All these novel approaches and proprietary solutions come at a cost, though, and so it will be little surprise that the retail price is almost as lofty as the promises that Black Inc is making about them.
Before taxes, you'll need to find €3,699 or $3,899 if you want to own a pair. With VAT added in, the wheels will fetch a cool €4,599. Though they do come with a limited lifetime warranty, which should offer at least a little bit of peace of mind.
