dkennison wrote:
Not necessarily pointed just at you ..... We all discuss WT protocol as well has how data is presented here on the forum. Who do you think has published the best, most comprehensive data that we could all say "Hey this is the standard".
Lets say we specify the A2 tunnel and we are talking about a complete TRI bike.
I thought Diamonds data was good. Any others?
I've sometimes thought testing should be done "as is - how you buy the bike" crap wheels and seat included.
Other times I think everyone is going to replace the "training wheels" with disk and 80 front so they should all just be tested that way.
It would be great if we could establish some kind of comprehensive, detailed and fair protocol - a detailed "how we want that data to look when presented - and see if manufacturers will adopt it. Or at least get close to it. It would be better than every company testing other bikes against a P5 and working the numbers to their advantage.
I think the issue with the data Ventum presented so far is that Faster is known to provide poor data. Not to mention, Ventum showed the P5 doing things in the tunnel that no one else has shown, not even Cervelo. So this calls into question the validity and quality of this data. Not to mention we know Ventum has data from A2 which tends to be of higher quality than Faster. So the question is, why hasn't Ventum released that data? Of course they are going to get called out on their Faster data. Of course they are going to get called out on not publishing their A2 data. Anyone with a critical mind would ask those same questions.
Regarding who has the 'best' aero data, I think one needs to understand the limitations of the particular aero testing and the specific way things were setup and what conclusions can be drawn from it. No test is going to be perfect. No test will give you an answer to every question you have. But multiple 'quality' test start showing trends and you can start inferring things from that. So if a company wants to set up bikes with stocks wheels vs. stock wheels, that data might be valid for that setup, but not really valid for the real world if customers are going to use Zipp/Enve/Hed/Flo type wheels. Not everyone has access to a Dave Z mannequin for their testing.
While not perfect, I think Cervelo, Felt, Trek and Specialized tend to do a good job with their white papers and aero testing. Not that any of them is perfect, but they tend to do a good job I feel.
