Originally Posted by
Onegun
Dr Gabe Mirkin uses an interesting setup for his wife Diane. It's a wide mountain bike bar with aero bars mounted on the ends. That puts her hands, (and aero bars), just slightly outboard of his hips, and he doesn't seem to have any problem mounting with this setup. I assume it's more for her comfort than anything else, but I'm willing to bet that it's more aero as well.
Pics are on the
Panthers Tandem Club members page, then scroll down to the Mirkins.
There are also some pics of them riding this setup in the "Ride Pics" category.
We played around with aerobars for the stoker, but never found a way to make them really aero.
The advantage of our setup is it aloows the stoker to get a flat back, eliminates aspace between stoker and captain. and allows the stoker to get narrow, with her arms drafting my back.
The advantage to the aerobars extending from the cowhorns is that it gives the stoker support for their upper body. But adding effectively 6-8" inches of frontal area would hurt aerodynamics.
I've seen tandem set up for very long races (RAAM like) but I think they were conceeding some aerodynamic loss for a position sustainable over hours and hours of riding.