neat, thanks for the link!

---

My Blog - http://leegoocrap.blogspot.com

Producing power in that position has to be a challenge.

It does make me think that when people say they run out of gearing on descents that they would just be better served by getting into a tuck and rolling down the hill with dramaticly reduced CdA. The tuck has to be lower CdA than the low sprint position.

Cool.

Biggest thing is imo being able to both “jump” from your leadout train and then also motor to the line.

I can’t see being able to jump well here. If one could do both, bonus.

The advantage is clear, but maybe other reasons it doesn’t workout.

Maybe a lead out train’s last guy could do this and the sprinter do the normal position.

Read intro.
Immediately searched document for "Caleb Ewan".
Was not disappointed :)

Thanks for sharing!
There is a backstory on Caleb's position that starts with Matt Goss taking second to Mark Cavendish at the 2011 World Championships. After that loss, AIS sport scientists took a group to the Monash University wind tunnel and had Matt adopt alternative positions more like the way Cavendish sprints. All of them lowered his drag enough that (assuming the same power) he could have won the World Championships that year. Tragically, he refused to ever try those positions saying they would hurt his power and they would not be safe.
But.... young Caleb Ewan was there too. Dave Martin did his Jedi Master thing and said "Lets see how low you can get your drag if you were try some really crazy low positions. Of course you could never actually sprint that way but lets just try it for fun in the wind tunnel." Well, he was able to get his drag really low and then went out on the road and worked on it till he could sprint with it. As you probably know, he's gone on to use it with quite a bit of success. Matt Goss, on the other hand, retired.
Cheers,
Jim

Matt retired in 2016, and apparently had a bunch of good productive years as a World Tour pro after this 2011 event, so I don't think it's proper to suggest this one thing pushed him into retirement. Also Matt still has better palmares. He won MSR. So far Ewan's best is 2nd.

And I'm not sure it's proper to suggest that power production doesn't play a role in what each individual choose in position.

I can't help but notice that (to my knowledge) there's been no pure track sprinter who's adopted the low position. And they take aero as seriously as anyone. Some sometimes use seated sprinting as part of sprinting from a long way out. But not a true low position (that I can recall seeing).

If the low position works in track the same way you're advertising it does on the road, then there's some low-hanging fruit for some track cyclists to clean up at the next Olympics.

Not quite as radical looking as Ewan but Matt Glaetzer gets pretty low.

The first time I heard of aero testing of a sprinting position was when Slipstream started. They did a bunch of wind tunnel testing for TT and they also tested some sprint stuff. Tyler Farrah’s leadout guy (the name escapes me but he was a New Zealander) tested some elbow position changes. Pulling his elbows in saved a whopping 100 watts at his leadout speed. He did say it wasn’t easy to hold and make power though, so I don’t know how much it transferred to racing.

Julian Dean

I suspect it's a gearing thing. Caleb can shift up, keep his cadence reasonable, and apply power by pushing more force on the pedals. A track sprinter using a tall enough gear to achieve that at top speed would have too high a gear to make an attack, or alternatively wouldn't be able to spin 120rpm/low torque in that position if they had low gearing.

In December 2016 we tested a world tour sprinter with an aero device on the road.
He was 40 watts faster in the lowest position. He believed he was more than 40 watts less powerful and chose not to try and hold the position. But at least he knew the aero cost/advantage.

You don’t sprint a fixed gear track bike the same way you do a geared rod bike.

There’s plenty of videos explaining the difference.

For one, you don’t see the rear wheel wildly swaying to and fro like a road sprint. Go try that on a banked wood track on a fixed gear and see what happens.