Impressive work. good job. Where did you get the black spiderman suit?
The link isn’t working for me, anyone else having any luck…
Kraig - excellent examples and explanations. I would be curious to see how your power output varied depending on position. Aerodynamics are very important (frontal area included) but with some of your differences only being to the tune of .008, a power difference could be significant in finding your optimal position. I am also interested to know how comfortable you are in each position. You briefly discussed this in regards to the ‘roll’ position and for comparison it would be interesting to know your take on the other positions you tried. (How long could you seriously sit on the tip of your saddle and race?!)
As for the ‘huge’ brake levers, what would you switch to that would be smaller? The frontal area on the wings of your aerobars is already minimal (Heds?) so being a newbie I don’t know what you would do to shrink them.
Thanks for posting your results. Not having to go to a wind tunnel and still being able to get similar results is pretty cool! Oh yeah, bonus points…my guesses are Specialized front wheel, zipp rear disk, hed bars, and the frame looks P2k-ish to my tri-noob eyes.
Peace,
Josh
That’s really cool!
The one comment I have to make is the lack of a helmet. You’d have to modify your skinsuit to have a bigger headpiece, but I think it would change quite a few of your numbers. From what you’ve already got, it would probably make the “roll” position look even better, since it’s the only one that hides the head. However, I think a faring (or Prologue helmet), as you suggest, in the normal position would be as aero as wearing a helmet and riding roll-style…especially, as the “roll” is less comfortable for you.
The aero helmet would make a difference but it wouldn’t improve this measurement. Since these are all purely frontal area measurements they ignore the effect of form on drag coefficient. Think of it this way, a rocket nose cone 1 meter in diameter and a flat disk of the same size both have the same frontal area but the nose cone would have a drag less than a quarter of the disk’s. The helmet would change your drag coefficient but would increase your frontal area. This is the draw back to basing position solely on frontal area.
Yes, ncooksey. I know. My comment on the aero faring/helmet was in addition to my comment regarding the main data presented and was only added since he mentioned it on the website. Did you read it all the way through? Thanks for the condescension, though. I hadn’t had a dose of that recently.
I didn’t mean any condescension. Sorry if you took it that way.
You’ve certainly got Spiderman and the other super heroes beat with that outfit. But you did forget the cape.
Now tell us Kraig, which of these is the real world position - ie, the one that you’ll be most comfortable to ride in and still obtain the best aero/power/comfort balance in.
This post is a classic Kraig. The bottom line of all of this is simple to me. Stay in the aerobars, just like Dan says.
Great work.
Yeah, sorry for the outburst. Just caught me at a bad moment, otherwise I wouldn’t have even blinked at it.
Anyway, I think Art’s got the gist of the final answer…especially when, but regardless of taking the other two dimensions into consideration.