Race Face / Fox Factory
Race Face T3 + Fox Mission Tailgate Pads
A three-piece tailgate pad system engineered for genuine tonneau-cover compatibility without giving up protection. Molded foam cradles the fork; a modular fit adapts cleanly to any truck.
- Client
- Race Face / Fox Factory
- Year
- 2024
- Role
- Designer and Developer
Challenge
Race Face and Fox Factory are part of the same parent company, so this brief came from both sides at once: shipping size, tonneau-cover compatibility, adjustability for best-in-class fitment, ease of installation, and enough strength to handle heavy eMTBs and gravel bikes. The full kitchen sink. Tonneau-cover compatibility was the big one. The spot on a bike that needs the most padding for protection is exactly where a closed tonneau cover leaves the least clearance. Those two requirements pulled in opposite directions, and reconciling them was the real problem to solve. Fitting multiple bikes from different categories side by side meant the spacing between them had to adjust too, not just the padding.
Research
Most of the research happened on real trucks: fitting every bike category I needed to support, tailgate up and down, tonneau open and closed. I brought in veteran testers, riders and mechanics with 20+ years in the mountain bike industry, plus World Cup Enduro racers, for field testing. The feedback across the board was strongly positive.
Design Direction
Function came first, and that part wasn't negotiable. I worked through how to make it work and the best mechanical solution before a single style line got drawn. To keep bikes upright and forks protected across that range of sizes and weights, I landed on compression-molded foam: soft enough to be comfortable, supportive enough to hold a bike upright even without the downtube strap (though using the strap is always recommended). The strap itself is fully adjustable, sized to run from a slim steel road frame up to a fat eMTB downtube with an integrated battery. Installing a strap into a tight, dark slot on a tailgate pad is normally a fumble, so I designed a custom webbing-threading tool to solve it. Between the pad and the tool, this project ended up with a couple of patents.
Development
I tuned the compression-molded foam specifically to Fox's fork dimensions, then worked with a supplier to produce production-accurate development samples that matched my 3D CAD, not just close approximations.
Prototype
The first proof of concept was built entirely in-house: sewn fabric laminated to foam, just enough to prove the mechanical idea would work. Every sample that came back from the supplier got modified in-house to chase down whatever problem it revealed. That loop, test an idea fast and only go back to the factory once it has a real chance of working, is how the project kept moving.
Manufacturing
I was on-site for QA/QC at the manufacturing facility, which let me catch and correct a few last-minute issues before production shipped. Each size was built to its own footprint rather than rounded up to one oversized box, which kept every direct-to-consumer shipment under the threshold for free shipping. That was a real win for customers.
Final Product
What shipped touches nearly every discipline I work in: softgoods, hardgoods, compression-molded foam, laser-cut components, all solving one connected problem. It's one of those projects where a lot of small, clever solutions add up to something that just works.
Reflection
This was the project where owning every decision, mechanical, material, and manufacturing, showed up most clearly in the result. When one person can carry an idea from a foam recipe through a laser-cut bracket to the patent filing, the whole system tends to agree with itself in a way that's harder to get when those decisions are split across a team.