Mavic XA Elite WTS 27.5in Boost Wheelset

There's nothing a mid sized tire likes more than a wide platform to mount on, and Mavic's XA Elite WTS 27. 5in Boost Wheelset ensures that the tire gets its rims. The combination provides a generous platform for a proper mid sized tire and by proper, we mean a tire whose girth is built for wider rims in order to ensure that the knobby cornering grip doesn't migrate up onto the center strip. The combination of a wide rim and a plump tire make for higher stiffness, more traction, and added cushion that in turn doesn't migrate into the mushiness of plus sized tires. The rim is classically Mavic: light, stiff, and as durable as alloy hoops come. The low weight comes courtesy of Mavic's oh so French ISM 4D process of extruding and machining the rim ooo la la! a process that's now in its fourth generation. With each successive iteration, ISM has gotten more and more extreme, removing extra material and rounding off the squared edges of previous versions. The strategic milling ensures that lost material doesn't equate to lost stiffness however, this new generation is admittedly helped in the stiffness department by the wider rim and the improved spoke bracing angle of Boost hubs. The XA Elite's rims also lose a bit of material from the inside, where Mavic has eliminated the bead hook in an update to its original Universal Standard Tubeless UST tire bed design. UST first surfaced in the late '90s, when Mavic teamed up with Michelin and Hutchinson to effectively kill the tube. As with most things bike related, Mavic proved that it was ahead of its time, and it took tubeless a while to catch on in the popular imagination. Now, of course, it's everywhere, and Mavic celebrated the technology's renaissance by introducing yet another development namely, the hookless beads mentioned above. Though it's counter intuitive at first, eliminating the apparent security of a bead hook actually makes the tire more secure. Stronger tire beads, bead channels in the rim's tire bed...