The Hungarian inventor of cycling dope was the star of a French fact-finding television series – VIDEO

István Varjas, the inventor of the newest generation of electric servomechanism bicycles, has been in the news quite a lot recently. 444.hu writes that he became a bicycle engineer and team manager after being a cyclist and now, a French fact-finding television series presented him as the newest protagonist of cycling dope. He invited the French crew into his workshop, where he showed them the newest development of the genre: the electromagnetic wheel.

This is basically a permuted electromotor, which doesn’t have a moving part in the traditional sense of the word, as most of the components (mostly magnets) are hidden inside the wheel so that they also move together with the wheel. Only the electromagnet and the battery are hidden in the bicycle itself. The advantage of the construction is that, while it’s silent, it gives more plus energy to the competitors than the formerly fashionable axle at the pedal’s driving rods or the electric solution hidden in the hub. It doesn’t warm up and it’s hard to detect its presence due to the carbon body of the modern wheels. The inventor believes that its only flaw could be the 2 kg wheels, but professional teams deliver so many wheels that the chance of this presenting a real problem seems quite small.

What 444.hu found especially funny about the episode was how the Hungarian inventor smiled so cheerfully and approvingly when the French reporter mentioned that these new generation wheels are so expensive that only teams willing to cheat on competitions could be potential buyers, as an amateur wouldn’t pay 50-200 thousand euros for one wheel.