November wind tunnel

This past week I went to the wind tunnel with the Source Endurance group out of Austin, Tx. We had 5 riders that were all trying to improve their TT skills, I think we helped most of them. Another interesting thing going on was that one of the racers was writing a new Fluid Dynamics program and was using his bike and wheels as a model. The rider on the left is Brett Faulk out of Houston, he runs a shop there, Sugarbikes, he had done a pretty good job of setting himself up already. We did test several things and in Brett’s case, because of his flat bike and shoulder shape, he was fastest with the helmet “tail down”.  Another rider that I’m going to show for example, had the more common “B” style or rounded back and he was measureably faster with his head aimed down. It is hard to see down the road this way, so we tested several helmets  and found one that was equal but allowed him to see further ahead, that should be better. We also did some testing for the never ending question of, where should I place my water bottles?  We had a cool situation where we had two riders with the same bike, the riders were of very different size as far as leg shape goes.  So, two 54 Cervelo P3c’s, the thinner legged rider was faster with a round frame mounted bottle, we tried aero bottles and no bottles, the thicker legged rider was faster with no bottles??  I will continue testing.   I made some headway on my newest seat, it still has a few rough edges. This week, it’s back to more running and swimming, I finally ran about a half mile during the 4 mile run Thursday that felt a little bit fast, maybe there is hope.

~ by johncobbresearch on November 16, 2008.