I have never seen an independent test that shows any of those bikes to be faster than a P3C, and certainly none of our internal tests do (and we don't really have a reason to fudge our internal tests, but of course that you can't verify that). As for pedaling, it has a very small effect, simply because the velocity of the foot is only around 10% of the air velocity. The velocity of the rest of the leg is even less. It certainly would be possible, though quite difficult, to make an articulated mannequin. and it would likely affect the aerodynamic similarities because those joints then need to be covered, etc, etc.
And you do realize that when people test a live rider with pedaling legs, he is not actually pedaling at normal speeds, so it's not the ultimate either. But when the whole bike industry does tests without riders or nonsensical tests with riders that can't repeat their position accurately, I am pretty happy that we develop a method that is over10x more accurate than the live rider method.
As an example for UCI-illegal bikes that don't benefit from this, if I take a KM40, I can improve the aerodynamics by adding a well designed seattube (we have actually done stuff like that, just for fun). Bottomline, the downtube can aide the flow off the front wheel (though not many do), the seattube can aide the flow over the rear wheel (again not many do), the toptube is great structurally without much drag (and taking it out requires the downtube to be larger), removing the seatstays sounds nice until you see how big the chainstays have to become to take the load. There really aren't very many things that make sense to do differently if you toss out the rules. And certainly nobody will make a non-UCI legal bike that is more aero than a UCI-legal Cervelo, simply because the potential gains aren't there. And frankly, because we can afford to spend much more effort on research than anybody else, simply because triathlon is a much more important market for us than for the other companies. And we can do that on a legal or illegal bike, that makes no difference. CSC is certainly not holding us back from making an illegal bike, I wouldn't know why.
I hope this explains our reasoning a little bit, gotta get back to work now.
Gerard Vroomen
3T.bike OPEN cycle