Just replying to the last in the thread, not specifically to you Jim.


It is really not an awful position. I know he's been in the tunnel with Simon Smart. I don't think it get's any better with 650c wheels. The biggest thing is that he needs to keep his ass in the seat instead of standing up around every corner. 13 seconds over roughly 30k. .005 CdA. He probably could improve that much if he stayed seated.

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Heath Dotson
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He wants to stand up every opportunity because he wants to open up hip hip angle with his 172.mm cranks....that's the culprit there. It's fine on the road stages climbing at 20 kph on a steep grade, not so great coming out corner and trying to get back to 50 kph.

Would that be why he's also up on the pursuits for every shallow climb? (vs Dumoulin who stays Aero for all but the steepest parts of the wine trial)

Cyclocosm has a good comparison of the two styles

UCI rules state:
-Saddle nose has to be 5cm behind bottom bracket
-Bar tips have less than 75cm from the bottom bracket

The rules also allow the rider to take ONE of the following morphological exemptions:
- -5cm on saddle ( saddle nose can move even with bottom bracket)
- +5cm on extension length

Also, if you are over 190cm tall your bar extension length exemption goes to +10cm to 85cm total.

That team have spent a lot on aero in recent years. Endura have a 3D scanned mannequin of NQ so they can work on clothing without him there. But his position is very much what you expect from going into the tunnel with the goal to get the lowest CdA on this (insert sponsors name) bike. Have to have some creativity for a rider his size.

He's humping the saddle to create space over the top of the pedal stroke with low cranks and tight hip angle, that it appears to be an Ares isn't helping. His bike offers little ability to tilt the bars in undermount position, even in overmount it requires the use of fixed angle spacers, so it's hard to optimise forearm tilt precisely (though not impossible of course).

Team need to learn that Campagnolo crank stickers are cheap. Changing those and the saddle would open up a bunch of positioning possibilities. Regardless of wheel size. He should be on 650, but that's not realistic so wouldn't be part of a serious discussion about how to go just a little bit faster in TTs.

another shot from the same race - Even at just 5'6", he can get as low as anyone when he wants - no small wheels or custom one-off frames needed:

From this pic, it looks like Nairo is a "long arm guy" unlike Mr. T-rex Levi Leipheimer. For long arm guys, the only way to get the head out of the wind is head down or longer stem and pads further out trending towards the Superman position like Jim was talking about above in this thread. With the 90 degree elbow angle if the head is up, and the back parallel to the ground the head is going to stick way up like a bobblehead as Sloman mentions earlier in this thread. The only way he can ride head up with a traditional long tail aero lid is literally with his back pointing "downwards" and aeropads even lower closing his hips even more (or so this visual would suggest)

Same size athlete on 700's Romaine Guillaume in Kona. Comments on his head down with bars angled up. gets to ride with saddle a bit further forward too due to non UCI, but have a look at how his entire front end is angled up

Is there any reason for Quintana not to have his bars angled up at least a little bit? In that photo they look like they are almost angled downward a bit which seems counterproductive.

There was a lot of talk going into the ITT about whether or not the Giro sponsor's skinsuit he was wearing could be a penalty over his team's skinsuit. With a final gap of 31 seconds it seems unlikely that that could have been a deciding factor, but I was wondering if anyone had any experience with what a worst case vs. best case skinsuit difference could be over that distance (the winning time was about 33 minutes). Looking at those photos the pink skinsuit seems to fit well enough so it probably wasn't a huge difference but could we have a GT title decided by the leader having a suboptimal suit at some point?

Couple of things. He had that skinsuit for all 70K of ITTing over the Giro.....was that skinsuit 0.5s slower per km than his team skinsuit. I would think not, but have no idea. On the angle of the bars, earlier in the thread, someone said his combo may have been one that cannot be angled up. That's probably a larger problem than the topic of this thread (would he be faster on 650's.).