I've just seen tape (black electrical tape, duct tape) in transition zone. Was thinking about using a home carbon fiber kit to make a mold and then make my own fairing, but due to time will just buy some aero extensions.

Flower arrangement foam block that you razor blade cut to shape then after taping in place wrap the thing over and over with tape. Then it's a "shape" instead of just lapped over tape layers.

What's everyone's thoughts on this running afoul of the fairing rule? It's not a necessary part of the construction, so if a grump race official looks at it, would it be a DQ? Or would they more likely just say, "you need to remove that". Any likely chance of finishing on a podium and having someone else behind you raising an objection that gets you post-dq'd?

I tried the same last year. I thought my solution was pretty dialed: custom hand molded thin Kydex (get Kydex from McMaster). I took a minimalistic approach; no extra material & it even directed air towards the outer portions of my normally exposed forearms. It looked sweet & aero, as I couldn't see where my frontal area was increased at all. It was 3w slower than open with a BTA bottle when tested. YMMV.

Oh crap! Might have to suck it up then 😂

At Sunshine Coast 70.3 here in Australia in September I got a phone call and had to remove the tape and foam from between my bars the morning of the race. They had cable tied my bike to the rack. There were a few of us got busted but was good to race.

Why does a race official have to be labelled grumpy when they are simply making the race safe and fair for everyone by enforcing the rules?

Try putting an arm sleeve or calf sleeve over the bars, folded back it can also have gels stuffed in the fold or an extra water bottle. Cheap, light and instant.

I tested w an electrical tape “aero bridge” but not without. I was thinking of a heat gun and plastic. Molding it to shape and creating sleeves for the bars that it could slide into. Put a garmin mount on it and boom…. It’s functional

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http://www.TriScottsdale.org

Look up SAM SPLINT in first-aid medical supplies. Bendable aluminum pre-wrapped in padding. Get the shape you desire and wrap it with the material of your choice.

I too ride a speed concept and have built a DIY fairing that can hold a few gels using a compression sock and some legos. I have no idea if its faster or not, but it works well as a gel holder and I need the extra storage for the IM distance so I'm going to keep it and continue to iterate. If I had a 3D printer and some skills, I'd make something more polished, but for the moment its just a sock and some legos. I suppose the low hanging fruit would be to fill in the space between the bars and my arms, though I put in a BTA hydration (not pictured) + a Garmin, so it gets complicated quick to optimize.


The post detailing how its made is below, but the subject is really about whether this counts as a fairing. Consensus seemed to be that yes it is a fairing, but if you 3D print it or have it mass produced, then the refs won't say anything. If it looks like you took a compression sock and some legos, then you're own your own.


https://forum.slowtwitch.com/...ing=fairing#p7963768


I ended up racing with step 3 at 70.3 worlds and with step 4 at IMAZ, and no one so much as batted an eye. I suppose if I took a black compression sock or wrapped the whole thing in electrical tape I'd be better off, at least from an enforcement perspective, but it doesn't seem to matter. I'm not sure if the rough sock material is better than a smooth electrical tape from an aero perspective, but there's definitely room to optimize this, so if anyone has any ideas, I'm all ears.

ETA - the SAM Splint from the poster above could work as a way to shape it a bit better and I might likely get in space for a few more gels.

As I understand it, solutions like this, or super extensions, generally test worse than native setups. If I were to consider doing something like this, the key piece for me would be to make sure the mod was actually providing an advantage. I would bet the mod in question would would not, and that the SC “wide by design” extensions are … by design, and likely pretty slippery, even if they don’t pass what might be the intuitive / eyeball wind tunnel test.

interesting idea - I guess u will need to "close" the front to avoid air pockets ???

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The entire event (IM) is like "death by 1000 cuts" and the best race is minimizing all those cuts and losing less blood than the other guy. - Dev

I'm probably in the minority, but USAT/Ironman needs to tighten up on their definition of a fairing. I like the UCI rule that there must be 2 poles extending from the basebar. I'm all for advancing tech and gadgets, but the aerobars that Ditlev is using is a fairing. Taping your aerobars like Laidlow in 2022 is a fairing. The aerobar that Skipper uses is a fairing. The Canyon one piece bar is a fairing.

Not sure how much difference closing the gap would make, bearing in mind your hands on the aerobars covers most of that. But a couple of paper staples will do the trick in an instant.

I should add that if you do use the sleeve to hold a bottle or gel in place it would probably satisfy any enthusiastic referee that it's not a fairing.

While we're on topic, has anyone tested this and found a net benefit? Obviously there's a bunch of interactions which make it difficult to generalize, but I don't think I've seen anyone who's posted results showing that in this case its making them faster. IIRC, someone in the Laidlow thread tested it and also showed it was slower.

Obviously having an integrated front end such as the new super-bars are going to generally be faster, but has anyone shown that taping/filling these specific bars from a speed concept or similar is faster for them?

'Filling in the gap' between your arms has one effect at steeper arm angles when the arms don't follow in the shadow of the hands, but even with flat forearm, relatively wide elbow setups there is *usually* a benefit to stuffing something in between them. When I was testing at ~15deg forearm angle there was a surprisingly large benefit (3 watts or 6 watts, from 2 runs) to taping the bottom of the aero skis together, even though my elbows were basically touching and the frontal area of the tape was maybe 2 sq inches max.

I rather regard "aeroness" as something akin to alchemy. Last year I did all the current fashionable things, went to a 1 x system, put latex tubes in and measured the exact pressure, changed my aerobar setup to tilted in the current (agreed) angle for best aero, tried the fairing (sleeve) and went 4 minutes slower. Of course I may have spent more time fiddling than training and I did get older. But this year will be better!

Yeah it's practically a Slow twitch trope: "if you're not testing, you're guessing". (Also, changing all of that stuff without testing each one individually leaves you questioning what happened. Maybe everything you did made you 10w faster, but the new aerobar position was 20w slower

There's some slam dunk things like latex tubes and removing the front mech. But without power numbers, course profiles and weather conditions the 4 min comparison means very little.