One of my athletes did 7.04 a couple of weeks ago - 10min up, 93-95s down
Too many corners to get a really fast descent time and the wind switched from favourable in the morning to very unfavourable later (next days were going to be raining so couldn't wait for better).



Wasn't really dipping into FRC as 10mins a bit long for that and for the duration our planning more like IM - decoupling and fade based (you can see the last 5 laps were pretty ugly - dropped to 300-310)
Also the mFTP is affected by team having Shimano PM

Given the recent attempts-

What would the ideal course be?

1/2 mile to 1 mile at what percent climb 7-12%, or is that rider dependent?

tail wind, low traffic, and room for turn around on a lesser steep bottom 2-4% to allow for a smooth u-turn.

Not interested for myself, just curious reading the attempts seem to have gone to a shorter, steeper, straighter hill.
It seems mentally the more repeats would be harder, but maybe pain is pain...

What tires did he use?

Rob

Definitely want as straight a course as possible because you would be “super-tucking” on the descent and that is far from ideal for cornering. My guess would be a descending CdA of around 0.15 and ascending value of 0.35-0.4, which probably explains the advantage of the tailwind.

If steep enough hill is selected (>12%) super tuck is only going to make a couple seconds difference and that advantage might be entirely negated by the effort to hold a stable/safe supertuck position compared to just getting a little lower in the front but not on your top tube. This coming from a chronic supertuck advocate. (me) :)

He did 75 laps, so 2 secs/lap would be 2-1/2 minutes.

Ideally, you'd want the profile to be as close to a brachistochrone as possible.

I think ideally, it would be determined by the descent, which seems odd since usually the slowest part of a course is the place where you can potentially save the most time. However, as I said above, this isn't anywhere near a steady state effort so I think the way to optimize is to pace it so that you can just barely recover on the descent. You can't overfill a battery so if the descent is too long you're wasting opportunities to fill W'. It's like trying to refill an empty glass from a faucet with a constant stream of water. If the descent is too short you can't refill the glass, if the descent is too long the glass got full and you're just wasting water.

In addition, you do want to accelerate on the descent as quickly as possible and the best way to do that is with gravity, so you want the top turnaround to be as steep as possible.

The ideal bottom turnaround would be one of those walls that downhill MTB'ers use to change direction like on those Red Bull runs.

I don't think I can say what his tire was until he does, but you can look at the lists of the tires with the lowest testing rolling resistance and note that the very lowest RR tires aren't terribly robust.

Thoughts on Vaughters' 'ideal'?

https://cyclingtips.com/...s-everesting-record/

So I was curious about this as well, especially that front end. That's clearly the Delta cover, but the brake shoe shown in that picture is clearly not an Omega brake. Entirely possible he just swapped the brake shoes out for something lighter, but definitely an interesting choice to rig a Delta cover on there. Absurd how much he beat the record by...

Maybe I'm just wildly unfit, but there is a significant reduction in energy renewal rate when I'm supertucked compared to just tucking while on saddle. So much so that the 2.5 minutes would absolutely be outweighed by lower power available for climbing for the other 7hrs (assuming I was anywhere near that performance ballpark, which I am not).

Re: brachistocrone. Yes, for the descent. But...

1. Per Everesting.cc rules: There can't be any ascent in the descent.
2. Relatively flat riding for the ascent is also suboptimal due to drag losses during power exertion being amplified.

Intuitively, it seems like maybe just having the road tilt up towards 14-16% at the very top would be optimal. Moves it slightly towards brachistocrone territory but without the two major tradeoffs listed above. Cost of that end-of-segment tilt up though is increased power required to stay near optimal cadence, or sub-optimal cadence for segment target power. Either way, the tilt up should be subtle, ideally.

I like Robert's idea of a banked bottom turn :-)