DY M AG W H E E LS C E O C H R I S S H E L LY
P92
INTERVIEW
the financial crisis to employing
over 30 people, with OEM car
contracts as well as numerous
motorcycle racing teams across
the world.
Tell us the story of Dymag.
How long have you personally
been involved with Dymag?
I got involved with Dymag at the
back end of 1993 and I was there
until early 1997, which is when I
ran the company when we were
pretty much the company was
dead then and I resurrected it.
We brought ourselves back
into all the Indycar stuff, which we
did very well in. We got ourselves
back into bike racing, especially
with the TT and British and World
Superbike, and then I left.
We developed the first three-
spoke carbon-fiber motorcycle
wheel while I was there. I left in
1997 and then when the company
went into liquidation in 2009, I
picked it up out of liquidation. We
spent the first five years just fo-
cusing on bike racing, which has
got us back to where we are.
We went from about four
people to about 36 people now.
We're doing very well with the
bike stuff, but what we're now
looking to do is to get all the car
stuff going. It's a big challenge.
You were talking about new
composites within building
wheels. Are you guys exploring
new avenues, different materials
for building wheels?
Yes. In 2000, we basically carried
on with a few modifications, mak-
ing the range of carbon and forged
aluminum wheels that we had previ-
ously made, where we made them a
bit better, stronger and lighter.
In 2014, we realized the old
Dymag technology, which was
bought out by a German/Austrian
group, was starting to be used
on BMW cars. We had a couple
places in Australia called Car-
bon Revolution, which started
to make carbon car wheels, and
BST of South Africa also made
carbon motorcycle wheels.
So, I realized that somehow we
created the multi-carbon market
in mid '95, '96, effectively the first
commercial bike wheels followed
by the first commercial car wheels.
We needed to get back into it.
But that meant we couldn't make
Dean Harrison has been
using Dymags at the Isle
of Man TT for years.
