aaronechang wrote:
In medicine and science, if other researchers are able to re-run your experiment and obtain the same results, then you can be pretty sure that they're the real deal. Until then - most researchers will remain skeptical of any outlier results. That's just a fact of life in science (to remain skeptical until proven otherwise). I realize it takes a lot of money and effort (none of which I am able to provide myself), but I'd be interested in seeing someone else try to reproduce these same results in a different wind tunnel. So while Specialized did a good job of running the test multiple times with different riders, it's still "one test". Another test run by a separate lab using the same methodology (but different testers and equipment) would rule out any variables such as testing equipment and would truly test whether the premise (shaved legs = 4-7% aero gains) is correct.
At the moment, this is the only experiment on shaved legs that shows significant gains. For all I know there may have been hundreds of other experiments that show the same results (or disprove them), but there have only been a handful that have been made public and that we know about. Of the ones we do know about - they don't quite match up with this experiment's results. That doesn't mean that this experiment is wrong, though.
Totally agree with your notes, @aaronechang. I hope that these results perk up some interest for others to study this a bit and we won't stop either. We need to do some on-road/velodrome correlations but honestly, we can only do what we can afford to do. We've still gotta make some new bikes and equipment.
For @TomA, I promised photos of before & after, results, and error bars. Here's to me leaving work late on 4th of July eve!
Here are the mean CdA values for each test with error bars representing a 95% confidence interval, per t-stat method with degrees of freedom between 2 and 12 depending upon the athlete and test case. Even if you take the most conservative estimates (the lower bar on each), there's substantial time/power savings.
And here's the before and after of each athlete (but I don't have photos of Luc):
Jesse Thomas - Dec 16, 2013
9 out of "chewbacca"
Mark - Feb 4, 2013
7 out of "chewbacca"
Aaron - Feb 4, 2013
6 out of "chewbacca"
James - Feb 19, 2014
4 out of "chewbacca"
Keith - June 24, 2014
8 out of "chewbacca"
(Note: scars were from mtn biking, not shaving)
Btw, while I was doing this, I thought, "huh, I have a lot of weird pictures of dudes legs on my phone". And immediately I was less into this project. That's it.
Mark
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Mark Cote
MITAerobike
Specialized Bicycle Components