Starling Cycles claims to have messed up the math on their previous mullet bike. The Tellum sorts all of that out by putting the little wheel up front for a party in reverse. It’s a ‘hair in your eyes” sort of approach. Check out their full press release below.
Starling Cycles challenges you to flip your understanding of mountain bike design with the all new Starling Tellum.
The Tellum is a ground-breaking, industry-shaking full suspension mountain bike… with a difference. It takes the scalpel-precision of a fast and maneuverable 27.5” wheel and places it up front. Then, it adds the blunt force of a tough, hard hitting 29” wheel on the rear. The bike is made with no geometry compromises and is built around Starling’s fast, compliant, and simple steel single pivot frames.
“I think I was misled in the way I applied the science” says McEwan. “I started from a clean piece of paper again and thought ‘how do we properly do this?”
McEwan continues.
I have talked a lot about gyroscopic stability, the forces that keep a wheel in-plane, and how this is the only significant difference between 29” and smaller wheels. A bigger wheel is more likely to stay in-plane and not get deflected off line, it is also more stable when leaned over in a corner. It is these factors that people translate as “better at carrying speed.” But conversely, they also make the wheel harder to be maneuvered in and out of line choices.
With the Twist I took the industry standard mullet solution and applied the wheel stability science, concluding it was better to have a big front wheel for tracking, and a small rear wheel for maneuverability. Essentially applying science to a pre-existing solution.”
With the Tellum, I took a different approach, if we start with the science, what solution do we end up with? What we want is a maneuverable front wheel, allowing it to be moved in and out of line choices, picked-up and put where we want. After all, the front wheel is where steering occurs! The rear wheel then just follows on. If the rear wheel is stable it just trucks on and keeps the speed, there is no need for a maneuverable rear wheel.
The solution, the Tellum, just works. The science is right, the bike is right!
I hope that my approach inspires the bike industry to flip their established notions of bike design and look at how they can do things differently. Who knows, maybe we’ll see a World Champion on this sort of bike soon?
The Tellum is available now for pre-order through Starling Cycles with a limited run of frames being built to order. Pricing and further information is available on request.
More info available at Starlingcycles.com.
