Several companies have experimented with surface texturing on bikes. Ridley brought it to market, but it sort of got lost because it was accompanied by a lot of other really bad ideas in terms of aerodynamics.

The basic idea seems to be that there is probably some potential, but not sure it's ever made it beyond that.

Part of the problem with testing something like that film is that it will necessarily make every tube thicker, and that's not really a fair comparison. You need tubes that are the same dimensions.

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"Non est ad astra mollis e terris via." - Seneca | rappstar.com | FB - Rappstar Racing | IG - @jordanrapp

I was just thinking about this the other day looking at the texture on my Octane suit.

I feel like it's one of those things that has trouble catching on for no reason what-so-ever, or some of the egos up top just don't want to take an obvious idea. Kind of like disc wheel covers. Just as fast, 1/17 of the price, yet hardly anyone has one...

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I still lapped everyone on the couch!

A couple of random questions:

1. Is there a decent chance that this would increase skin stage more than it reduced pressure drag?

2. As I understand it, Cervelo's airfoil shape sacrifices high yaw performance in order to perform better at low yaw whereas Trek's airfoil is "virtually" longer which helps at higher yaw but with the downside of presenting more frontal area and thus not quite performing as well at low yaw. If you had to guess, would it make sense that texturing would help a Cervelo more than a Trek?

Random thought: perhaps you could play with textured panels in different patterns on the top tube of the Dimond in an effort to coax wind along/up it to get airflow to reattach behind the rider sooner.

Pure anecdote, and not really related to your post but Len Brownlee had a Certain type of 3M packing tape which was smooth and he used it on the front (leading edge) of John Montgomerey's sled when he won gold in 2010 Olympics.

Apparently they did 30 or 40 hours in the tunnel leading up to it and a piece of tape on the front was worth something more than the margin he won by. Which IIRC was .009 seconds over 4 runs.

Celebrating after:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWgZkUcC9hM

Maurice

I recall that testing with sand-embedded paint was tried on bike frames (same idea, trip the boundary layer flow turbulent to get better adhesion and lower pressure drag). Tunnel testing showed it to be slower. This was with round tubed steel frames, which theoretically would benefit more than aero frames.

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