Between the Races: Specialized’s Nic Sims

Specialized Bicycles sponsors top-level motorcycle athletes like the Hayden Brothers, Casey Stoner, Ben Spies, Ben Bostrom, Noriyuki Haga, and many more, supplying equipment to aid in their training. We recently got a chance to talk with Nicolas Sims, head of global marketing PR for Specialized, about the company’s involvement in road racing.

RRX: Tell us a little about your position with Specialized.
Nic Sims: My job is doing all of the PR; I deal with all the bike-related media. I’ve been with Specialized for twenty years doing everything from the customer service, running the R&D shop, and doing all of the athlete support. It was in that role that I sort of got into the motorcycle side.

Specialized’s involvement in road racing is fairly recent. Can you shed a little light on how that came about?
About six years ago, when Alden Baker was Nicky Hayden and Ricky Carmichael’s trainer, he approached us. He’d seen the bikes and out of the blue decided to ask Specialized if they wanted to do anything. He basically said, “I’ve got these athletes, can you supply them with bikes to train on?” So, it kind of fell into our lap. A lot of us here are really into motorcycle riding and racing, and when the chance came to get on board with Nicky [Hayden] and his brothers, we jumped at it. We were like, “Sure! This is Ricky Carmichael, it’s the Hayden brothers, and they get a lot of visibility.” So we give them a road bike, helmet, and shoes; they’re happy and we’re happy to help supply them. It all pretty much developed from there.

For us, it’s a nice way to get cycling out to another audience. That’s always the hard thing: that cycling is a rather tight-knit community. But if you can reach out to others, whether it’s the guys who watch motocross, MotoGP, or AMA, it’s always nice to put it out there. We actually invited those guys to come to Tour of California this year, just to see what cycling is all about, and they were all pretty blown away. We got them in team cars and they were like, “They’re like rally drivers trying to keep up with these guys!”  Nicky was pretty impressed by how fast the cyclists go downhill. He does 200 mph, but these guys are doing 60 on a tire that is under an inch wide, flying around corners without leather to protect them.

So it’s nice to get a different perspective, and the last couple of years we’ve tried to do more with the athletes. And for media, it’s a good crossover story about how these guys train. People think it’s interesting, like, “Okay, he’s a good racer, but what does he do to be that good?” t’s a good way to get cycling out there.

Who are some of the riders that Specialized sponsors?
Well, obviously the Haydens, but more recently we’ve been involved with Ben Spies, who came on board last year, and Chris Vermuelen is new for us this year. Out of our offices overseas in Spain and Italy, we take care of Noriyuki Haga, Toni Elias, and [Andrea] Dovizioso. We’ve got a pretty good spread. We also work pretty closely here with Doug Chandler, an ex-GP racer. And the nice thing for us, too, is that we get feedback from these guys.

Do you use that feedback for bike development at all?
Well, we have Doug Chandler as a field tester for us on the mountain-bike side. With the road guys especially, suspension setup is critical—it’s winning or losing a race—and they can feel every little thing. The feedback you can get from these guys is different, but it’s really pinpoint detail compared with working with cycling pros or other teams. They’ll tell you how a bike wants to tuck the front wheel going into turns, and ask you how to go about slackening the head angle or changing the offset. It’s feedback we get from our mountain-bike guys, but if we’re getting it from another source as well, then there’s something to it.

With Nicky and those [MotoGP and WSBK] guys, we’ll ask them what they think of the bike and they’ll tell us, but they’re too busy to give us full field testing data. But with Doug Chandler, I get e-mails from him every week talking about changing this or that. With his background, he wants to re-valve shocks and things like that. What he says is pretty much bang on. We did some changes on some bikes last year, which he rode, and he was like, “Oh, you slackened the head angle by half a degree.” The average person wouldn’t notice that much difference, but he felt it in ten minutes of riding. It’s pretty cool.

Where would you say road racers stand in terms of fitness and cycling ability?
The guys that ride, Nicky, his brothers, Ben Spies, are actually really good cyclists.
You’ve got Ben Bostrom racing solo in 24-hour mountain-bike races, and Ben Spies just did the 24-hour race at Laguna and placed tenth. These guys have full-time jobs, but cycling is a passion for them, too. They have natural ability, and if they put their mind to anything, like [Travis] Pastrana going rallying, I don’t think it would matter what they focused on. They have that natural talent. You know, I think when they’re at that level, if they wanted to change sports and put their mind to it, they’d be just as good at cycling as they are at road racing.

Specialized and Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca recently put on a ride that allowed  media and members of the road racing teams (including racers) to go shoulder-to-shoulder around the track on bicycles. Do you have anything like that planned for the future?
Certainly we’d like to look at any opportunity. It’s a cool way for riders and media to interact. The ride at Laguna came about because our headquarters here in Morgan Hill is relatively close to the circuit, and they knew we sponsored a bunch of riders. They were like, “Hey, why don’t we do something?” So we decided to bring a bunch of bikes down and give media a chance to ride the course. I don’t know, maybe some people have been around that course or walked it, but if you ride it [on a bicycle], you realize how big a climb it is up to the corkscrew and how much elevation gain there is, and I think it gives a little different perspective on what they do. When you’re seeing someone flying up the hill at 150 mph, it’s a little different than when you have to pedal it.

It’s also nice for the media to ride along with the athletes, get a chance to chat with them, and get some personal time. So, yes, we would like to do more. How we’re going to go about doing it, we’re trying to work on ideas, whether it’s a ride at the end of the season that we put on and invite cycling- and moto-press, or something else. We’re thinking about doing the 24 Hours of Moab, putting a team together with motorcycle athletes and media, and we’ll have all the full support that we had out at Laguna. It’s just the logistics, but if we can get the time and people together, then certainly we want to do more if we can.

Are you going to have a presence at the Red Bull Indianapolis GP?
I would certainly like to go. I missed Laguna because of that little bicycle race around France, but whether we’ll have the presence there this year that we had at Laguna, I don’t know. We met with the Indy guys at Laguna, and maybe if we can’t do anything this year, but we get feedback from people who came and did the ride at Laguna… If we could make it an event for every U.S. round, it would certainly be pretty cool for us to do that.