My brief history of hitch and roof ski and bike racks
My history with bike racks and how that informed our thinking about Gravirax. About 40 years ago I used to race road bikes. Our team mostly had our spare equipment in a van. The good news was the van was totally purpose built for our race team, our equipment was protected from the elements and theft. It’s a great solution if you have a team and a budget to have a van or two totally dedicated to your sport. Alas I wasn’t that good, my access to the van went away and eventually I shifted to using a roof rack. What was nice about the roof rack? It kept my bike out of my car, allowing me to keep my car clean and full of people and other stuff. Otherwise, the roof rack sucked. It was a pain to load, hurt my gas milage, was noisy, the bike was always covered with dead bugs, and I had to be super mindful not to drive into a garage with the bikes on top—otherwise disaster. Fast forward to about 20 years ago and the popularization of hitch mounted bike racks. What is great about hitch bike racks? They are easy to load, don’t hurt my gas milage, they are quiet, and no dead bugs. Downside was a longer profile to the car, fear of bikes getting damaged in a fender bender, blocking the backup camera and getting dirt and road grime on my bike. No solution is perfect but given the increasing height of cars/ SUVs I will take loading at street level over wrangling a bike to the top of a 7’ SUV roof any day.
We took all of this history into account when we built Gravirax. We found loading skis on the top of increasingly tall cars somewhere between inconvenient and dangerous. We wanted to ensure that the backup camera was unobstructed so we made our rack wider instead of longer and allow for 72 different rack set ups to provide maximum backup camera visibility. Also that square shape allows the rack to serve as an off season storage device in your garage unlike a hitch bike rack that just eats up space when not in use. We limited the moving parts to 1 pivot because we know that the massive temperature swings in the mountains breaks moving parts. We didn’t install an integrated lock because we know that those tend to freeze and then fail---better to have something you can remove to protect it when you are not using it. We even allowed you to place the rack far enough off your back bumper to allow for trunk access without having to pivot the rack in most cases. Best of all, anyone can load skis in seconds. The major downside of course is the added length to your car. Our racks add about 2 to 2.5 feet to your length. That is about the same length as a 2-bike hitch bike rack and a foot and a half less than a 4 bike rack. Will your skis get dirtier on our rack than in your car on long rides? Absolutely. Does the Gravirax ski team find themselves tuning their skis more frequently now? NOPE. Do we make a cover if your commute to the hill is super messy? YEP.
Do I wish that I still had a team bus to transport my bikes, spare tires, and a team mechanic. For sure. Would it be cool to be on the US national ski team and have my skis transported inside a van and tuned every day before skiing and have what wax I was using adjusted to the conditions of the day---YUP. But for the rest of us who aren’t professional athletes, but who ski 25+ days a year having a ski rack that you don’t have to think about is a pretty awesome option to get your gear to the hill.