A reader put the question to us a few weeks back, if a larger wheel size was coming, and if 29 was better than 27.5, would a bigger size be even better? I did some digging, and learned that Travis Brown at Trek is testing larger-than-29-inch wheels as we speak. Of course we reached out for more info, and Travis was kind enough to let us peek behind the curtain.To get more news about carbon mtb rim, you can visit zpebicycle.com official website.

You can listen to the interview with Travis in this week's Pinkbike Podcast, as well as our commentary on what it could mean for the industry. But we figured this deserved its own transcription as well, for the people who don't want to listen to an hour of banter.
If you followed cross country racing in the '90s and the 2000s, you've probably heard of Travis Brown. He was a regular on the World Cup circuit, before turning his attention to product development with Trek in the mid-2000s. These days he's the field test manager, running an entire crew of riders who are working on products that we're going to see in the future.
Travis Brown: Yeah, I don't know what bird got out of the cage, but we have been messing around with some unusual wheel sizes. It has always been interesting from the 26, 29 comparison and mixed wheel platforms in 27.5, those kinds of things influence the character of a bike so much. So yeah, we're still messing with that.
Travis Brown: When I moved into the RD department, we still had the Trek brand and the Fisher brand independently. The Fisher brand was our 29 inch wheel platform brand and we honestly struggled with that wheel platform under that brand for nearly 10 years before the rest of the biking world decided, "Yeah, that's probably pretty good for some applications. We should try it."

Ironically for the Fisher brand and as it got absorbed into Trek as like the Gary Fisher line in Trek, was right around the time where it didn't seem like the European market was going to ever adopt the 29 inch wheel. And then almost overnight, there were a couple German mags that did some field tests and said, "Hey, this works really good." And the next year 29 inch wheel bikes in Europe were huge. So, I don't know how you predict that kind of thing.Travis Brown: Well, we've done a little experiment. We've continued to experiment with mixed wheel platforms, not with the idea that we're going to go to production with it, but because it gives us a really good understanding of the independent roles of the front and the rear wheel. We've been also messing with diameters larger than 29 to see if there's efficacy and where that space might land and what the advantages and what the liability are.