Back in 2021, 27 year old Cedric Eveleigh unveiled his new bicycle drivetrain concept to the world: the Lal Bikes Supre Drive. While the global mountain bike market is pretty big, the drivetrain market is largely sewn up by the big two, Shimano and SRAM. Companies like TRP, Rotor, and Microshift occupy a relatively small share of the market, and those doing anything other than a traditional derailleur drivetrain — like Pinion and Effigear — occupy an even smaller niche.
So it’s a big move for a 27 year old from Quebec to come onto the scene and tell everybody they’re doing it wrong. Even more so that his wild idea garnered an overwhelmingly positive reaction across various online platforms known for being hyper critical.
We spoke with Cedric back in September 2022, at which point he had just moved operations to Sechelt on the Sunshine Coast, BC, and had recently announced a collaboration with Nicolai for the Supre Drive to appear as an option on the Nucleon 16 frameset. A little over a year later, I took the opportunity to catch up with Cedric to find out what’s going on at Lal Bikes and to take a tour of their HQ, a short ferry ride away from the bustling metropolis of Vancouver.
Tucked away in an unassuming industrial estate in Wilson Creek, just a few minutes away from downtown Sechelt is Lal Bikes’ headquarters. Cedric moved operations here from Chelsea, QC, back in late 2022 because of the year-round access to trails for testing for bikes and drivetrain components.
Meeting Cedric for the first time, I could immediately feel his passion for mountain bikes and the Supre Drive. His background in mechanical engineering shines through, and it’s clear that he’s spent a lot of time thinking about this, and is immensely knowledgeable on the underlying mechanical principles. There are a lot of engineering types in the bike industry, and like most of them, he was excited to tell me all about what he’s been working on.
Walking into the Lal Bikes HQ, it’s a modest, but highly functional space. The more you look, the more you’ll find. Downstairs is some heavy equipment including a Bridgeport mill, a large manual lathe and taking pride of place is a Haas CNC milling machine, with automatic tool-changer; that’s their party piece. A small room tucked away under a mezzanine houses a Pocket NC 5-axis CNC mill for producing pulley wheels, and several 3D printers for rapid prototyping and producing derailleur parts.
The Haas mill produces all of their aluminum parts including the tensioner arm, derailleur parallelogram parts and upper chain idler. The pulley wheels are machined on the Pocket NC from super slippery Acetal plastic, and the derailleur knuckles are 3D printed from carbon-filled nylon. All of the parts that go into the Supre Drive are manufactured here in Sechelt, allowing them a ton of flexibility and control over the quality of components, as well as being able to rapidly produce batches as needed and make fast, iterative changes.
Supre Drive may look complicated, particularly on the Nicolai Nucleon, which is already a busy looking frame, however the drivetrain system itself isn’t much more complicated than a conventional drivetrain. Instead, the derailleur is simply distributed differently across the bike.
Cedric admits that Supre Drive is only compatible with high pivot bikes due to the need for an idler pulley, which complicates things further and does limit its appeal somewhat, but for high pivot bikes he is convinced that this is the superior drivetrain option, and his claim seems plausible to me.
The Supre Drive could be implemented with a link driven single pivot bike as with the Nicolai, or with multi-link, virtual pivot type arrangements. Cedric says that rather than trying to fit the Supre Drive to an existing design, it’s easier to design the frame from scratch around the Supre Drive layout, and that this approach allows for much more design freedom, which is how Nicolai approached things with the Nucleon 16.
Getting a first-hand look at a new product is always a learning experience for me. The way I physically interact with something makes it more tangible and gives me a much better understanding of how it works than a photo or engineering drawing. This was absolutely the case with the Supre Drive, immediately answering questions I had about how the drivetrain is set up, how it keeps the chain from falling off the derailleur pulley, and how it keeps tension on the chain.
The biggest surprise that isn’t immediately obvious from photos is that the derailleur itself is relatively similar to a traditional one, with limit screws and cable tension being the main adjustments available. Theoretically it should be set and forget, with maybe an occasional cable tension adjustment. There’s no b-gap adjustment and no possibility that the derailleur can go out of alignment.
Furthermore, the frame uses standard Super-Boost rear wheel spacing and Supre Drive runs on a standard Shimano 12-speed chain, cassette and shifter with a regular T47 bottom bracket. The spring/damper for the tension pulley is housed inside a cartridge inside the bike’s downtube. The tensioner arm rotates on a big bearing around the bottom bracket, controlled by a shift cable, which feeds around a barrel and into the cartridge with a mechanical spring and hydraulic damper to control the movement of the chain. This cartridge, which shares similar dimensions to a dropper post cartridge, places some limitations on frame design in terms of downtube shape, makes in-frame storage a challenge.
Cedric tells me, however, that thanks to the leverage ratio of the arm, this results in even chain tension across the entire gear range, as opposed to a traditional derailleur that gives more tension in the easier gears and less in the higher gears which happens to be the exact opposite of what would be preferable. This is one reason the Supre Drive is relatively efficient. The lower chain tension in easier gears results in less drag.
Cedric was keen to point out some other design features that make the Supre Drive relatively efficient for a high pivot bike, including the large 22-tooth idler pulley with smaller angles between the chain’s links improving efficiency. Additionally the tensioner pulley acts as a lower chain guide pulley which eliminates the need for a dedicated high pivot system pulley, again reducing drag.
The final piece in the puzzle is how far forward the idler pulley is placed, resulting in a very long piece of chain at the top of the system, where all the tension is while pedaling. This results in a lower chain angle at the extreme ends of the cassette, reducing side-loading on the chain, again, meaning less drag. It’s features like this that show Cedric has put a lot of thought into the Supre Drive, and it truly is a well-rounded concept that, despite some extra complication, could be a viable alternative to the big two.
When I asked Cedric about SRAM’s recently launched T-Type, he laughed and said “Transmission is good competition for sure.”
He told me that he has ridden it and thinks it’s a very good product, and does solve a lot of problems with traditional derailleur-based drivetrains, but “the lower pulley is still very close to the ground, especially on a 27.5-inch rear wheel.”
Cedric conceded that a high pivot bike with Supre Drive may not be for everyone, since it still can’t match the weight and efficiency of a cross-country bike with a traditional drivetrain, but “for all-mountain and enduro type riders, Supre Drive is the better option.”
Walking through the Lal Bikes HQ, I met Alex, Lal’s sole employee, a mechanical engineer from South Africa. Alex is just as strong in his convictions as Cedric, and it’s obvious that the pair truly believe in what they’re doing. Cedric took pleasure in showing me all of the iterations of the tensioner arm they went through to get to where they are now, and their bench-testing jig, where every single derailleur is assembled and tested for functionality before being shipped to the customer. This jig also gives a better visual representation of the system without the noise of the rest of the bike. On the back wall are Cedric’s first two frames that he hand-welded for testing the Supre Drive, a testament to his commitment.
It’s easy to look at Supre Drive where it was a year ago and wonder what’s changed since the silhouette of the system looks roughly the same. It’s clear that Cedric and Alex have been working on improving things since the system started appearing on Nicolai bikes. Cedric says that around 30 complete bikes are now out in the wild, including under a couple of German racers on the Nicolai team. He enthused that the racers were able to put the system through much more than he could, creating problems that he had not experienced. Once he knew what the problems were, he and Alex could replicate them in a test setting and set about solving them.
A couple of running changes from the initial product include machining the tensioner arm from billet aluminum rather than 3D printing them. This makes the part much stronger and reduces inconsistencies they were not able to control with 3D printing, which led to a small number of failures. The derailleur parallelogram parts are now CNC machined rather than 3D printed, and some other small parts have been optimized and refined.
When I asked Cedric about general reliability, he was optimistic, saying that most parts had not experienced failures, and in general the system has been extremely reliable, with nobody yet wearing out pulley wheels or experiencing any failed spring/damper cartridges. That said, all the parts are available to buy on the Lal Bikes web store, and he is committed to providing a lifetime warranty and full support, having already followed up with parts for running changes for early adopters.
Lal Supre test ride
It all sounds promising, but the proof is in the pudding. I came here to ride it. Cedric had a Nicolai Nucleon with a 490mm reach available for me to ride. We ventured out for a 14km loop of some of Roberts Creek’s finest trails, with about 750m of climbing on a mix of forest service roads and singletrack, with steep, technical descents as well as some high speed flow. Short test rides are always tricky; it can be difficult to get a true feel of a bike from one ride, so in this case I did my best to focus on the drivetrain, and let’s just say I was impressed. Having ridden the new high pivot Trek Slash earlier in the year, the Supre Drive feels more efficient right off the bat, a combination of the high anti-squat of the frame, and the low-drag drivetrain.
The Nucleon isn’t exactly a spirited technical climber, especially since the bottom bracket is quite low, but spin it up a forest road and it’s surprisingly efficient. This is further evidenced by the fact that any backpedalling is super smooth and quiet. Even putting the bike in the easiest gear and spinning the cranks backward results in a free-spinning chain, something not usually possible with 12-speed drivetrains.
Here’s the kicker though: usually with an alternative drivetrain like Pinion or Rohloff, the shifting experience is markedly different. Supre Drive is super-normal. The XTR shifter is instantly familiar, executing crisp, easy shifts, though perhaps a touch heavier than a Shimano derailleur. The actual shift on the cassette is a tiny bit slower thanks to the greater chain wrap on the cassette. It takes longer for the chain to climb onto the next sprocket, but overall the feeling is very familiar, and if it were a blind test, I probably wouldn’t be able to tell much if any discernible difference. It goes without saying that the drivetrain didn’t miss a shift the entire ride, as is its main selling point.
The final surprise is how quiet the drivetrain is. On the climbs as I mentioned, thanks to the low chain angles, there’s next to no chain noise, adding to the overall feeling of efficiency.
On the way down was where I really tuned into how quiet Supre Drive is. The bike is essentially silent, especially on high-speed chattery sections of trail, where the high-pivot suspension and Supre Drive work together seamlessly as a bump-eating machine, ripping noiselessly through the forest.
Bottom line
Consider me a convert. I’ve long been saying that the traditional derailleur drivetrain’s days are numbered and, in the absence of something better to suggest, maybe gearboxes are the future. Now I think the ‘something better’ might just be the Supre Drive. Clearly it’s not for everybody, and there are certainly some refinements to be made, but consider the case of an EWS racer or somebody that just enjoys riding challenging terrain way out in the backcountry. A snapped derailleur or tweaked derailleur hanger that might end the ride is now one less major problem to worry about, and there’s no need to sacrifice weight or efficiency to make that trade-off. Just cash.
Supre Drive is really impressive. I appreciate Cedric’s honesty, openness, and enthusiasm, and it’s clear that he’s passionate about it, but what’s next? Well, for now, Nicolai is the only brand to be using Supre Drive for the next little bit. Cedric does have some big plans on the horizon, but currently isn’t able to share them.
Personally, I think Lal Bikes is going to be one to watch for the next few years. Cedric has the drive and creativity to keep pushing the envelope, and I think a little bit of disruption and creative thinking is just what the industry needs right now. It’s still very early days, but I’m excited to see what comes next, and safe to say I’ll be keeping an eye on Lal Bikes, and will keep the updates coming as I hear them.
