The Meatballs prioritize grip and feedback in an all-mountain wheel that’s meaty all the way to the core. Fresh out the wrapping, the Meatballs are really quite grippy. You can trust them to lean hard into a corner and hang on. After you break in the wheels, the consistent urethane depth across the contact patch of the wheel accounts for a great high speed freeride wheel that you can really lean on and count on for strong braking power. These aren’t a long-slide wheel. They are a scalpel on the mountain.
Pantheon started by designing a custom core. The core features peaks and valleys that you might be accustomed to seeing in much larger downhill wheel cores, helping the urethane to stay on the hub and provide for consistent wear across the contact patch. But Pantheon did it with a core that is only slightly over 35mm in diameter, meaning you get a lot of urethane depth to play with and more bang for your buck. On the Meatballs, that’s a whopping 18.9mm of urethane depth. That’s a lot of wheel. This pays you back in longevity, and it also makes the wheels feel super plush underfoot.
Lastly, the Meatballs come with skin. The Pantheon manufacturing methods result in no mold release on these wheels, so you don’t have to wash them with soap to get them feeling right. The 74a are intensely grippy out of the box, and the 78a are a little more forgiving. And because they have a wider contact patch than many wheels of similar size, they offer quite a bit of mechanical grip. Once broken in, this results in a nice, in-the-pavement feeling slide with a lot of stopping power. These are not what some would call “cheater wheels.” They are built to do the job of slowing you down when you need to cut speed, and they will reliably hold you on the pavement when you need them to.
