How it all started.
“I’m a fanatic cyclist!” laughs Gravaa CEO, Gertjan Van Ginderen, in answer to our question about how he would describe his feelings for two wheels. Today finds us in Gravaa’s HQ in Eindhoven to interview our fast founder about how he came up with the idea that tire pressure shouldn’t be static, but fluid, how he brought it to life, and, eventually, how it arrived on the wheels of some of the fastest cyclists in the world.
“Actually, everyone in this building is a fanatic,” he adds. “My first love was mountain biking, races, marathons and those sorts of things. I live in Zeeland, to the west of the Netherlands. In that area, we have a lot of beach races. We might say that beach racing is a typically Dutch pursuit, although it takes place in other countries, too. Anyway, in Zeeland we have a race called The Coast Marathon. It’s 54km of sand combined with stretches of asphalt that connect the islands of Zeeland. First there’s 14 km of sand, then 12km of asphalt, then back to the sand. You get the idea. Before I did the race, a colleague at the time advised me to ride with big balloon tires and to take co2 cartridges so I could stop to inflate my tires for the asphalt sections, and lower them by stopping once more to manually release the pressure when I arrived at a sand section. The reason of course is that sand and asphalt are almost perfect examples of surfaces that demand different tire pressures - very low for the soft sand, and high for the firm asphalt. Their requirements are so different that not stopping to change your tire pressure would almost guarantee a bad result.”