These in-depth scientific studies always seem to neglect the weight and aerodynamics of the RIDER. That is surely the biggest factor when it comes to speed and efficiency.
It's always funny with people having paid $10k extra to save a kilogram on their bike, and then show up on the Sunday group ride with a beer belly. But I think these articles and study are mostly written for / paid by professionals, and they don't have that much more weight to lose.
But reading "The secret race" by Hamilton (one of Armstrong's team mates), they do focus obsessively on it. They would often ride for hours, then take sleeping medication and go to bed without eating.
> It's always funny with people having paid $10k extra to save a kilogram on their bike, and then show up on the Sunday group ride with a beer belly.
Ah, the smell of fresh gatekeeping in the morning. You don't know what road these people are on, just their current state. For all you know, they've already dropped dozens of pounds and are happy with their own improvements. Never look down on a fat person on a bike.
I didn't gatekeep or look down on anyone, those I'm talking about is me and my friends. It's just a funny jab at ourselves, spending way too much money and effort on things that ultimately wont matter. At least we have fun doing it :)
I'm a cycle advocate and spend hours a week fighting for infrastructure etc where I live, that I hope helps all kinds of cyclists.
They are climbing mountains though. In a flat area this advantage nearly disappears. I have that typical cyclist underweight build and it barely helps me on gravel rides, really only when there's a direct headwind. And it's balanced by how much more I get pushed around by crosswinds.
It's definitely very significant for european-style touring races, but people overstate it for even high-level amateur rides especially in flatter areas. Which is most gravel riding.
When framed that way, it seems odd, but is it so strange that someone with means spends $10k on their hobby? That's really what it comes down to, more so than the weight-savings. If you like riding bikes, and have the money to spend on it, why not spend $10k on a fancy bike?
The rider is a much bigger factor, of course. But that’s not the problem being addressed here. You’re not suggesting the bike should not be optimized are you?
It makes no sense to optimize the bike in isolation. There is complex airflow interaction between the bike and rider. There are changes that aerodynamicists could do to reduce bike drag that would actually increase drag on the complete bike plus rider system.
The problem is that there are so many variables with riders. For example, just a slight change in head position can increase drag more than any improvement in frame tube shape could save.
A skinsuit or roadsuit will definitely make you faster on the bike. It's pretty easy to measure the effect with a power meter.
Weirdly "aero socks" are both a thing and make a big difference to the point that they are heavily regulated by the UCI.
Any cylindrical part of the bike or rider is going to perform badly so if you can encourage the airflow to stay attached around it you reduce the amount of effort required to move you forward, hence aero clothing being a big deal.
If you're a serious cyclist then it's pretty easy to spend money on good quality clothing.
Always made me wonder if taking the swimmers route instead would provide all the same benefits without the cost and look. Shave your whole upper body and go shirtless and you would be pretty damn aero no? Would a skinsuit really improve upon that?
In addition after switching to a Brooks saddle (I tried literally 10s of saddles using the "saddle swap" forum feature on some forums) I now no longer ever want to use padded bike shorts again. Of all the short types the simple padded chamois was my favorite (simple foam - no gel or any other BS) and now I just prefer wearing a pair of synthetic lightweight boxer briefs (no fly) that were designed for hiking originally. There is no padding at all and from day one the brooks was extremely comfortable. It only got more comfortable with time and applies all pressure directly to my sit bones. Every other saddle + padded short (even ones that mostly were on my sit bones) ended up forcing padding into the areas between my sit bones and outside them as my weight compressed the padding. I havent tried their new non leather seats but they seem to operate by a similar tension (a tensioned pliable surface vs a hard plastic shape with padding on top) which results in your weight creating additional space below the sit bones vs filling it with padding.
It's actually been tested and modern fabrics are better than bare skin for drag.
In Michael Huchinson's Faster[1] it mentions that they tested a rider naked in a wind tunnel to find out!
If you look at a modern TT skinsuit you can see that they try to cover as much of the arms and legs as possible. They usually stop above the elbows and knees because it's hard to cover the joints without wrinkles.
Likewise, socks are now as long as permissible (without breaking the UCI sock rules!), which I think is about halfway up the calf. It would be faster to cover all the way up to the knee joint.
It all sounds silly if you don't race but if you've put some effort into getting fit then after awhile it's hard to gain even 5 or 10 more watts. If you can reduce your drag by more than that just by wearing a better pair of socks... well why would you?
BTW I have a Brookes on my commuter Brompton too. :D
I remember him initially being sort of balanced and reasonable then he started pushing supplements etc. Then a few years later, he started showing up in infomercials pushing all sorts of crap.
I liked his cookbook, I presume it was ghost written.
His usual shtick is to have a guest on who promotes quack notions and he just sits there pitching softball questions without challenging the BS coming from their mouth. That gives him cover when Congress calls him in to testify about misleading the public.
I work for a very large company that is supposedly "leading the charge" in the IPv6 space.
Three years ago all groups were supposed to have converted completely to IPv6 by the end of the year. Never happened.
Back then the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses was "any day now". I guess someone must have found a closet with a bunch more of them somewhere.
I think for us operations types IPv6 is still too complicated. I mean when someone says "hey, what's the IP of that web server?", saying "192.168.13.129" is easy. You can even memorize an address like that. "fe80::2bdd:d4c5:f093:300a", not so much.
Besides the IPv4 address exhaustion problem I don't think anyone has made a compelling argument for IPv6 yet. At least not on the ground.
> I think for us operations types IPv6 is still too complicated. I mean when someone says "hey, what's the IP of that web server?", saying "192.168.13.129" is easy.
There's a cure for that, it's called DNS.
But seriously, building IPv6 networks feels strage for a few hours, after that you just wish IPv4 would disappear because it's clumsy and ambiguous in comparison.
IPv6 leaves so much room to logically arrange your (and the world's) whole network in one namespace without any RFC1918, making routing and firewall configuration really easy and elegant. Soon you will be able to know a system's VLAN/function/location just by looking at certain parts of the address.
Memorization is important. Although so many more provisioning/procuring processes are automated than they were during the Internet's rapid growth phase in the West, engineers and other professionals still have a great need to handle the addresses, and to do so without frequently needing to look them up.
I observed that it took a little while for the majority of network-touching professionals to become accustomed to memorizing an IPv4 address in one or two glances. I believe doing the same for an IPv6 address is possible. As this happens, the adoption rate will accelerate.
>I guess someone must have found a closet with a bunch more of them somewhere.
I lived in such a closet one summer a couple of years ago. If I'm getting this terminology right, they had an entire 16-bit block to themselves (65k addresses).
Company I just left after 12 years had an entire /8 and a /16. One of the projects I worked on in 2014 was moving a lot of the stuff out of the /16 (which had been owned by a subsidiary that was bought almost 20 years ago) and into the larger subnet.
I heard rumors that they were going to renumber out of the /8 and start using RFC1918 addresses for all "internal" (non-Internet-facing) stuff in the next couple of years.
