FEATURE
Eric DeGolier and Gustav Iden
DATA DRIVEN
Body Rocket was created with the goal of making aerodynamic data more accessible. BikeBiz catches up with founder Eric DeGolier to see how the business is progressing
E
ric DeGolier came up with the idea for Body Rocket while training to compete at the 2004 Paralympic Games in Athens, as the able-bodied tandem
captain with three-time Paralympian Matt King in the match sprint and kilo.
As a design engineer, he’s worked for Trek Bicycles,
PowerTap, and CycleOps, as well as leading innovation at well-known protection brand D3O. However, in the background he had an idea to make aerodynamics more accessible by creating the world’s first device to provide real-time aerodynamic drag force measurement for cyclists and triathletes, with the accuracy of a wind tunnel.
“I decided that I needed to either stop wasting my nights and weekends or actually get serious about it,” said DeGolier. “So that’s when I left D3O and started Body Rocket. That was 2018 when we formally started the company. It was a couple of years of pretty heavy R&D as nobody had done this before.” By 2020, there was a product in the wind tunnel that proved the concept and physics were working so Body Rocket opened its first funding campaign - reaching its £80,000 goal hours ahead of the official launch.
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As of October last year, more than £400,000 of investment had been raised from a mix of private investors, former professional road racer Alex Dowsett and crowdfunding.
From prototype to pre-production A key milestone for DeGolier and Body Rocket was to get the product on the bikes of as many athletes as possible. To do this each of the four sensors, on the handlebars, seat post, and on each pedal, needed to be extremely accurate. “We realised that the pedal sensing technology path we had decided to go down wasn’t going to work,” explained DeGolier.
“So we had to start from scratch and redevelop the entire pedal part of our system. We had hoped to work with some of the power meter companies but we needed something more accurate.”
Soon Body Rocket was on the bikes of Gustav Iden and Kristian Blummenfelt, two of the best triathletes in the world. “That brings us up to the last big technology push, which has been making the move to go from our prototypes, which were small and clunky, to our pre-production systems,” said DeGolier.
November 2023 | 29
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