If you're having a bike race with a sibling and you lose, you know what to do: Blame the bike. That's what Yutaka Kondo did when older brother Nobuo beat him in an endurance race six years ago.

Thing is, the Kondo brothers aren't little kids: They run Kondo Machine Corporation, an ultraprecision machining company that cranks out everything from aviation parts to manufacturing machines to bicycles. So after their race, the younger Kondo brother took his bike apart and discovered that, yep, the rear axle had sustained damage during the four-hour contest.

If the axle's not perfectly straight, or if the wheel isn't perfectly round, then the user is fighting not only inertia, but the bike itself. Realizing this, Yutaka became obsessed with how to minimize power loss and spent six months literally reinventing the wheel. This being a passion project, manufacturing costs were not considered, only functionality.

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This resulted in Yutaka's Gokiso Hub, a fiendishly complicated piece of engineering containing an internal suspension system that protects the bearings from impacts sustained by the wheel, allowing the milled shaft—already rendered five times stronger than average in terms of ridigity—to spin unmolested by external irregularities. The Gokiso Wheel consists of a carbon-fiber rim precisely engineered to balance light weight with having enough mass to provide flywheel-like inertia.

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This wasn't an ego project, by the way, where Yutaka would feel that he had to manufacture every last part; for spokes he opted to go with ones manufactured by Belgium's Sapim, finding that they already offered superior rigidity. Thus the Gokiso Wheel and Gokiso Hub were, if not exactly designed around Sapim's spokes, at least designed to perfectly accommodate them.

With all of this put together, the no-compromise wheel provides "the sensation of gliding on ice" and delivers startling performance. When a competitor's wheel is spun at 18 miles per hour on a test rack, they run out of momentum and come to a stop in about 90 seconds. In contrast, Yutaka's wheel keeps spinning for six minutes. (This fan-made video on YouTube shows someone spinning the wheel by hand, and it doesn't stop for ten minutes.) And there's more:

Using a test bike rigged with rollers and sensors, Yutaka ran the wheels at speeds of up to 300 kph (186 mph), close to the top speed of Japan's bullet train. Then a durability test: 100 kph, 10 hours a day, for 100 days, a distance twice the earth's circumference. After all that, Nobuo says, the wheels still spun like new. The Gokiso has one-third less mechanical resistance than the next-smoothest wheel on the market, the brothers say, which means speeds 1 mph to 2 mph faster for most riders and crucial seconds shaved off pros' race times.

Those statistics were reported by Bloomberg, in an article pointing out the central issue of the Gokiso: They cost US $7,900 per pair. Since their invention, they've only sold 30 pairs.

Which is a shame. We now live in a time where our manufacturing technologies are so sophisticated that we are well capable of making the best things in human history to date, things that are an order of magnitude beyond any incremental improvements we've made throughout most of our time on this Earth. Yet few folks, it seems, are willing or able to fork over to buy the best.

For those interested in the science and engineering behind the hub, or for any cyclist who's interested in what happens to your hub when you ride your bike—or even install it to the fork—peep this: