From Durham, USA
(January 26, 2022) – As we all know, in sliding sports there’s always a “team behind the team”: Coaches, trainers, etc. One of those very important roles is of a sled tech, someone who looks after, maintains, and repairs bobsleds over the course of a season.
In August of 2020, the United States Bobsled & Skeleton Federation hired on accomplished sled builder Marc Van Den Berg as the team’s Technical and Equipment lead. Earlier this season we had a chance to chat and learn more about Marc and what he’s done in his time in the sport.
A sled tech isn’t exactly the most common job in the world. How in the world did you get involved in bobsled?
I’ve worked for all sorts of teams and for the last 16 years with Eurotech Viking Engineering. We’ve done sailing, speed skating, and I’ve even engineered race cars for several teams!
I was doing the Trans-Oriental Rally for Team Viking Engineering. It’s a race from St. Petersburg to the great wall in Beijing. It took three weeks, and halfway there we got a call on our satellite phone from the Dutch federation asking us to build bobsled equipment for Vancouver. But I had no idea what a bobsled was, I had to google it when we got to Beijing at the finish of the race.
In 2008 we joined the Dutch team, traveled around the World Cup to see what bobsled was all about. I wasn’t really used to the cold! In 2009 we built a sled and it worked out well. The Dutch usually didn’t have a second run. We sort of used what was available and we built a sled from scratch but didn’t know really what I was doing, but I figured it was working. The first race we entered was Königssee and we finished seventh! That was pretty good. The race after that was St. Moritz and we got third place behind Andre Lange and Lyndon Rush.
After that we went to Vancouver for the Olympic Games. The other nations saw that the new guy with Viking Engineering is building a nice sled! So then the Canadians asked us to work with them, and then the Latvians.
After 2014 me and my wife Sonja decided to move to Canada, and I was working full time for BCS Canada, and now with the United States. And that’s how I got involved in bobsledding.
Is there anything that carries over from making cars go fast to making sleds to go fast?
Yes, but the only problem is that they’re the opposite! In a car you’re going to start with a stiff chassis because you’ve got the suspension, shocks, tires and everything to create grip. You have to approach sleds from the other time, because we have no grip or suspension. It’s all the same game though, but if you’re from racing and you think like a race car tech it’s never going to work. But it’s great to have the experience about creating grip and how understeer and weight transfer works because that’s happening in the sled as well.
Technology has changed, how different is what you do now compared to what it was for Vancouver?
What we built for Vancouver, we tried to approach it from a completely different way out of the box and maybe because we didn’t know exactly what we’re doing it worked really well. But everyone caught up by the time we got to Sochi. We still had a gold medal with the sled that Kaillie Humphries had, though. We won a lot with Canada, but it’s always the same with everything you build: Teams catch up. They’re looking around at everyone else’s equipment, I’m looking around at everyone else’s equipment. If I see something new I try to copy it, so they did the same thing. After 2014 we sort of got behind because some things were changing, there were new designs and new materials out there and it took some adjusting. The sleds have changed a lot, the carbon technology is almost changing daily.
It’s basically different by sled. But everyone can do well in a BTC sled. We tried to build a sled in Canada, and that worked out well, we built it specifically for women’s bobsled that was a little more lightweight. But you can build an average sled that suits everyone. Here in the USA we’re going to be building two types of sleds before the 2026 Olympic Games together with Hans DeBot from Debotech and Cameron Dempster from Corvid. One sled more for developmental sliding and one more for the World Cup. The development sled will be a little more robust, can handle some crashes without any trouble. With your high-end World Cup sled it’s not going to handle many crashes. If you have to do repairs you change the structure of the sled, it then handles different, so going forward we’re doing two types of sleds.
You’ve worked with Kaillie before in Canada, but now you’re here with her in the USA. Has anything changed with how she likes her sleds?
With Kaillie it’s always a bit difficult. I know what she wants because I’ve worked a long time with her. She knows exactly what she wants and is an exceptionally skilled pilot. When she moved to the USA she tried a different type of sled, and it didn’t work out so well. We tried the BMW, but that didn’t quite suit her. Through the season we tried a sled that worked a little better but we ended up in a BTC sled, and that’s worked great. It would be hard to get her in another sled.
When a World Cup sled crashes, do you strip it all down to check it over like you would a race car, or does it depend on how much time?
It depends on how much time we have, but normally you have to make time. It’s got to be safe: It’s a high-speed sport, and you’re responsible for the athletes in that sled. I take the whole thing apart, check for cracks and damage, realign everything. If the alignment is alright we’ll still change it a bit.
If we need to do repairs on carbon, handles or something like that it’s never perfect. You can make changes while on the road but it’s never exactly the same, it’s more emergency work that you end up doing.
The aerodynamics on sleds have changed over the years. They look very different now than they did ten years ago.
It’s changed a lot, in part because a lot more teams have access to wind tunnels now. The sport is at a higher level now than it was ten years ago. About 15 years ago you’d have one or two teams go to the wind tunnel once in a while. Now a lot of teams are there a few times a year like we are. We have access to the A2 wind tunnel in North Carolina, and we get time in there to change a lot of sitting positions. We work on those positions a lot with sled heights and things like that as well. But everyone has more access now than they used to. More teams have access to computers, models, and everything. It’s getting more expensive, but it’s getting deeper into the technology and that’s why you see the shapes changing.
How different are the different sleds to work on?
They’re all completely different. Every sled is different than a BMW, for instance. You can’t compare a setup for one of those to a BMW to a BTC or anything like that. We continue to keep on thinking on what we’re doing. For Elana and Kaillie they drive similar sleds but we still have very different setups between the two as they both have different driving styles. The setups are entirely different in the BTC than they are in the BMW, too.
Monobob: When did you get the first new version of the sled, how is it to work on them?
It’s completely different. There’s only one person sitting in the sled and it changes the balance differently. We saw it for the first time in Winterberg on the first of January 2021. We set it up and the first race was in Königssee. We had a week to look at it, Brian Shimer and I set it up and we set it up pretty well. We had really good results with that sled, but it’s a completely different sled. It’s a nice design though, it’s a really good feature for the girls. Some people don’t like it because it’s hard to handle, but the driving skills will end up being better for the women then the men.
You’ve been with the USA for a while now and have worked with all these great pilots. What keeps you going and doing this, you’ve won everything there is to win as a sled tech?
What keeps me in the business is the drive to improve material the whole time. I like to look around and see what’s around and come up with new ideas and try to fabricate something new and see if that works. That’s something I’ve done my whole life: I have built my own stuff, I don’t like working with off-the-shelf stuff.
