Lance was not a sponsored athlete of ours, but we did do his discs for many of his tours. As somebody who attended 2 different wind tunnel camps with him, I can attest that 1. he was not nearly as meticulous as the stories report. and 2. he was and is VERY loyal to Steve Hed. When we showed him the original 808 in 2003 it tested better than the Hed3 at all yaw angles below 20 in the bike, and yaw above 20 isn't exactly common when you're moving at 34mph, and he told me straight up, that he wouldn't ride it no matter what the data said.
You have to remember as well, that these guys are really probably justified in their skepticism of what manufacturers tell them. When a guy like Lance finds somebody he trusts like Steve, that goes a long way, and quite honestly, I can't blame them. It's sort of like a good friend of mine who makes these amazing socks (Swiftwick) and every year at the bike show I bet 10 companies come and tell me they make better socks than Swiftwick....but you know, I'm really happy with mine, and they are the best socks I've ever worn...and I have a history of destroying almost every other sock, so why risk it? There is a good story on VN today about aero helmet designs, and it really highlights some of the behavior that has plagued our industry in the tunnel for years, and one of the key problems is seeking the desired result. Ironically, my first experience with this was a test with Lance where the Nike guys brought the original Swiftspin or whatever it was called body suit. The claim was 3 minutes saved in 40k...to which John Cobb and I looked at each other very skeptically and john in his awesome Louisiana accent says 'Dayumn! Don't they realize at this level there ain't no more 3 minutes to be had!'. So we put the suit on Lance and run a yaw sweep and run the calcs and find ~18-20 seconds saved...not insignificant, but NOT 3 minutes. So then almost an hour was spent trying to get him to turtle his head, try slightly different shoulder positions etc, and finally, something akin to a minute-thirty savings was found and they have him hold it and pedal to take the data point. At that point, Lance was done, had no more desire to be in the tunnel, there had been no real time to do any actual positioning work and we spent the rest of the day running the bike only, but those guys got their 1:30 for that suit...which of course was completely irrational. The data showed that IF he held his head and shoulders in a completely unnatural way while pedaling for 30 seconds and you took a data point, he would save X drag... based on his otherwise normal position and clothing. This type of thing has historically been rampant in helmet testing, I cannot count the number of times I've seen a data point aborted because the rider 'moved his head'...but you know what? Riders move their heads when riding..that aborted data point was likely much more realistic than the others. Ideally, you would have a dummy with a prescribed range of head movement that was repeatable so you could compare designs.
Ultimately, for me, many of these experiences led to products. The whole 808 toroidal rim happened because I saw them testing the bikes in the tunnel with 19mm tires, but as the bike was running, Johan was in the control room telling me that he wouldn't allow anything narrower than 21mm. That sparked an entire product category for us. It is very hard to beat the Dupont/Spec/Hed3 with 19mm tires, but rather straightforward to do it with 21's. Comparing 3 spoke wheels to deep section wheels in bikes led us to really go deep into understsanding the flow interactions between frame components and wheels which led us to be the first guys really heavily running advanced CFD...which led to Firecrest and so on. Firecrest is another good example of building a mental prison cell...every wind tunnel in the world takes data by averaging values over a period of time, generally 30 seconds at 100-1000 samples per second. When we first saw harmonic effects in our CFD, we didn't understand it at all, but realized that the very nature of how we looked at the data was the problem...we were looking for the 'data point' when in fact there were harmonic effects in play that were outputting a 'data range'. Getting to the bottom of that changed the thinking of the whole industry.
But of course, all this highlights the natural skepticism and disbelief that plagues even the more technically minded athletes.
And finally, the narrow bike was without a doubt faster in every single test I know of. A great example of a rider getting off the bike and saying 'see, I told you, it's not fast' and the engineers with the data looking incredulously saying 'OMG that was the fastest we've ever seen you go at that power!' In the end, the 'feel' of the rider generally wins that discussion. Now the real money to be made is in figuring out exactly what that 'feeling' is that makes people feel fast or slow. Pro's talk endlessly about 'sensations' and if we could isolate THAT we'd really be onto something!
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