bjorn wrote:
Cool stuff! My question is how you controlled for keeping bike position constant between runs to isolate the difference in each change you made? What I'm getting at is that to find out if a bottle or other equipment changes(and some positional changes as well) makes a difference, the bike position needs to be very stable since relatively small changes there might skew the results a fair bit. Holding a position can be hard enough in a tunnel where you're stationary, and have visual aids to help you, so I imagine it must be significantly harder on a track. Especially with most people probably not having much experience riding on a track at all before testing.
We made one change at a time. So we never, for example, lowered someone AND changed their helmet. We just did it in isolation. If it didn't work we would go back and change a single variable. As far as having someone hold an exact position, that was going to be hard as you said. But no one was going full gas and from what I saw when we would re-baseline, the runs would be withing the margin of error. Towards the ends of all the runs there were definitely some throwaways as people started getting tired and drifting.
No system is perfect which is why I think this is a great compliment to wind tunnel testing. In the tunnel you can get away with some crazy positions that might test fast but be unsustainable, on the track it is pretty obvious right away if it something you can hold. The model has been validated enough by people like Robert, Tom, Alex, and Andy, that we feel pretty confident in the results we got back. Like Brian said, more work to do and more questions to be answered.
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