It's the moment you've all been harassing us for the last six long weeks. The Aero Bike Shootout Report (link to download here) from the testing of the Cervelo P5-X, Cervelo P5-6, Diamondback Andean, Ventum One, Premier Tactical, and Felt B Series look like this:



What does this mean?

Note: I'm going to talk here in watts loosely but they change based on your speed and other factors. The report is far more precise with this kind of thing.
Also note: these drag curves (lower is faster) are presented as points but there's some fuzz, some error range around these things. Maybe + or - 2 watts.

• These bikes are somewhere around 10 watts apart in low wind and a little more on a windy day. So, in other words: really, really close.
• Cervelo's bikes are pretty much a cut above, superior at every yaw point. The P5-X is just a hair faster than the P5-6, two watts maybe.
• The Premier Tactical kicked ass. It's like 3 watts maybe 4 watts down from the Cervelo bikes.
• And then basically every other bike is right there on top of each other, especially in low wind conditions.

We did a model. It's a model. It has errors. You can read all about the caveats in the paper. But the course simulation stuff from cyclenutnz cranks out this at Chattanooga 70.3 based on me as rider:

Cervelo P5-X: 2:15:01
Cervelo P5-6: 2:15:19 (+ 0:18)
Premier Tactical: 2:16:25 (+ 1:24)
Felt B Series: 2:16:32 (+ 1:31)
Diamondback Andean: 2:16:45 (+ 1:44)
Ventum One: 2:16:47 (+ 1:46)

We did the same thing for Starky at Florida 2012 when he rode 4:04, using Felt as baseline:

Cervelo P5-X: 4:02:17
Cervelo P5-6: 4:02:46 (+ 0:29)
Premier Tactical: 4:04:28 (+ 2:11)
Felt B Series: 4:04:39 (+ 2:22)
Diamondback Andean: 4:04:48 (+ 2:31)
Ventum One: 4:04:59 (+ 2:42)

Here what I think:

• It's crazy how close these bikes are. So the P5-X is 18 seconds faster than the P5-6, which was 16 seconds faster than the P4 (based on the data from Cervelo we ran through the model). So yeah, we're pretty much in the age of peak aero. Welcome. Your bike isn't getting any faster. Save your money and go train.
• Obviously the winner here is Cervelo. That's not disputable. Somehow they made a just as fast bike with disc brakes. And a frame that can hold lots of gear and partially absolve the the most common aero sins.
• Also a winner in my mind is the Felt. It's practical -- easy to travel with and work on -- and inexpensive and light and it look damn good in my opinion. And all it is is an old frame set up well. So you know things just aren't improving all that much from a performance perspective.
• Premier Tactical is a big winner. ~$3k for all that bike (frameset) and fast as basically almost anything out there except Cervelo and Trek. It's hard to make an argument to buy a different bike. Unless you have $16,000.
• I am surprised by the Andean results. I don't know how a bike that narrow doesn't test better in the wind tunnel. It's kind of heavy too. Which is actually a concern all of a sudden when most of the bikes are 30 seconds in a 70.3 apart aerodynamically.
• I think we all thought the Ventum would win or come close, so that's the biggest surprise here. It's still right there in the hunt, but as tested it's not close to Cervelo at any point. Lots of reasons why this could be. We discuss some of them in the paper and have talked a lot with Jimmy about it. There were some exposed bolts on the front end to hit my fit and other things. This stuff isn't perfect of course, but we did our best.

Despite all this, the differences between these bikes still seem meaningful.

Thoughts?