WhyFi

But now he's good looking, so that's gotta be worth something.

Campag4life

An aero advantage of thin section tube shapes is an immutable fact. There is no denying it. Just like denying that a Ferrari has a lower drag coef than a school bus. (extreme example)
So what is comes down to is...what does it mean to 'you'. You have repeatedly stated...not much. I will tell you I don't fit the demographic either really because I don't ride that aero to begin with. I may benefit slightly in the few times I am riding solo about 23-24mph. So I am not running out to buy such a bike either. That said, I believe there is an advantage for a serious racer. If you are racing against the clock then why not ride the most slippery bike since air drag is such a big deal to speed? It even trickles down to Pcad who loves his Foil. He says its the fastest bike he has owned and he maybe right. As it turns out...for some, nth degree aerodynamics isn't the be all. Most of us care about it...but some prefer say a more compliant ride or a more upright riding position and will choose a different bike. Or some may prize a super lightweight bike even though I am not in that camp either. But your dismissal of aero bikes as Walter Mitty marketing hype is wrong in the sense that such a bike isn't maybe appropriate for you....or even me...but I believe for others with the right body and desire to compete...it maybe the best bike.

roadwarrior

It's not marketing gizmo. For a professional, it certainly works. For people that have the income to ride a professional quality bike, more power to them.

it's Ok to not have the income to buy a ten grand bike, but "feeding them a line" about the benefits...that's up to the buyer.

spdntrxi

I'm building a Madone 6.2... let you know later.. personally I think AERO will help, I'm probably marginally fast enough for it to help a little so why not.

RollCNY

Confession: I lust after a front wheel with cx-ray spokes. All of the data says it may make a 2 watt difference at 30mph, but I want them. Did I mention that the bike in question is my Single Speed? No, I probably didn't.

merlinextraligh

Highly unlikely. Sagan's not a GC rider, and he'd have to totally reconfigure himself to become one. He has the potential to win a lot of green jersey's, win Worlds, and win Classics. I doubt trying to win GC in a grand tour is even on his radar screen.

Sagan's forte is his ability out climb all the sprinters, and outsprint everyone but the pure sprinters. But he can't climb with the GC guys.

Last year's TDF he finished 82nd on GC, down 2 hours 38 minutes.

pgjackson

You are correct, I have never swapped out a fork on my bike. But I have ridden many different bikes with different geometries and sizes...never once did I think the steering was different. I did notice that moving from a 56 to a 52 that the 52 seemed a little squirley and less stable...but that went away quickly.

I don't mean to harp on this either. It really is an unimportant point. We're still friends, right?

reqm

Thanks for the suggestion RobbV. Felt seems like a very nice brand. A lot of good options so I'm having a tough time narrowing it down. I'm quite intrigued by Canyon bikes, either the Aeroad or Ultimate CF SL. Has anyone had experience dealing with them? I live in Korea and the shipping is gonna cost $400+ USD so I'm a little hesitant (still very good value even with the huge shipment cost). Comparable bikes from a LBS would cost a lot more. Plus they have great reviews and look fantastic!

OldTryGuy

OK, so I just finished a 90 miler one week before next Sunday's 70.3 triathlon. The bike in the tri is 56 miles so no sucking wheels and any aero advantage from the frame is appreciated. I am 63, 5' 8" and 135lbs, so not a bus by any means. DID NOT purchase the bike for its aero properties, rather for its comfort which as I have stated before is remarkable, FOR ME. To dismiss the aero advantages would be ridiculous since even at 23/24mph I am realizing it compared to a non aero bike of the same weight. I have no intensions of getting the bike any lighter than 15 pounds since that is UCI regulations and for the guys I ride with who have 14 pound bikes, I can suck their wheels just fine.

hhnngg1

There is definitely an aero benefit, but it's also important that you realize it's so small that bike manufacturers need to use a 30mph headwind in a highly controlled wind tunnel to get reproducibly measurable gains. Take it outdoors, and the variability of conditions make it essentially unmeasurable. The benefit is still there, sure, but it is indeed very, very small and in many instances may be so close to zero that you can consider it zero.

For sure, if you encounter someone that says the can subjectively tell that they're going faster on an aero bike vs nonaero bike frame, it's highly unlikely that that's reality, considering the time savings are MAX 1 minute per 40k at high speed, and likely closer to <30sec per hour.

gsa103

The gains are small, but definitely well above zero, even in realistic conditions. The manufacturers have gotten much better about testing across a range of yaw angles, so you can see what the benefits are across a range of speeds and conditions. Keep in mind that yaw angle reflects relative airspeed, so a 45 deg yaw angle is riding at 20 mph with 20 mph cross-wind, which isn't a common occurrence. Yaw angles <30deg are much more common.

And it matters much less in pack racing conditions. A rider in the middle of the peloton has almost no aero drag.

hhnngg1

fedsf

hhnngg1

If you cannot reliably measure the gain in speed in real world conditions, in practical terms, it would be reasonable to call it zero.

You can make the same argument with a blood pressure medicine that lowers your blood pressure by 0.1 mmhG. Sure, it can work every single time and the manufacturer would not be lying if they said "statistically significant reduction in blood pressure", but you know full well that it will have no significance and actually be completely unmeasurable give the variation in dailly blood pressure with other conditions. It's not the exact analogy as the aero frame, but the idea is the same - if environmental and other factors drown out the measurable real-world gain every time, you can in effect, call it zero, even if there IS a miniscule speed gain.

Again, I'm not denying that there is any speed gain - there is with an aero frame. But you have to be dead honest about the magnitude and significance of that speed gain, which is hugely overstated by both manufacturers and most people who buy/own them. To the point that it's actually very common for people to say "I FEEL the difference in speed!" Uhh, sorry, unless you can detect a 0.1-0.2mph speed gain (at best) while going 25+mph, it's placebo effect.

asgelle

Actually, people are routinely field testing all sorts of aero equipment (so much for the too small to measure fallacy) and finding the major manufacturers (Felt, Trek, Cervelo, Zipp, Reynolds, etc.) claims pretty much spot on.

pgjackson

Actually, a .1mph difference in speed would be significant. I think the supposed aero-effect is much, much less.

grolby

Yep, I don't it's right to say the gains are overstated in terms of their actual effect. It's fair to say that the marketing focuses on the aero benefits in such a way as to amplify the seeming importance or relevance of those gains, but the actual numbers do not appear to be inflated by the manufacturers.

If you were to make a BF bingo card, there would have to be several squares with variations of "unless you race," or "for the average rider," and so on, because that's always what people seem to fall back on to argue that these aero frames or wheels are snake oil, or a waste of money at any rate. It's a flawed premise, though. Aerodynamics are important at essentially any speed even a slow roadie can ride, and in terms of time saved they actually benefit a 15mph rider far more than a 25mph rider, because the slower rider is spending more time out on the road. So, in terms of real-world improvements to their average speed along a fixed course, the slow guys will get more improvement out of the aero stuff than the fast guys.

The key point to remember for all of these things is that, no matter what you're talking about, the benefits are extremely marginal. Small gains across many pieces of the puzzle (frame, wheels, helmet, kit, etc) add up of course, but one of the nice things about cycling is that the amount of speed you can actually buy is limited enough that improvements in fitness, tactics (in the case of racing) and bike fit swamp all of them. The job of any consumer has to be to figure out which pieces are worth the price to them. The bang-for-buck of an aero frame set is pretty small compared to an aero helmet, or a more aerodynamic fit, and probably wheels as well. And if you've got different values than squeezing the maximum possible speed out of the fitness you have, you might prefer a nicer ride, or a steel frame, or... the list goes on.

But all of this stuff gets lost in the argument that we always seem to have here, which is "are the claimed gains real?" With plenty of people willing to jump in and embarrass themselves by saying "no." Which is the wrong answer! The much better answer is "yes, but is that what you care about?" But that requires thinking about the products that the bike industry is trying to sell us in a more nuanced way. And in a way, that means the marketing people are winning, because the companies telling you how much more aero their bike is the than the next one don't want you to think too deeply about it, either. They want you to think faster = better, and leave it at that.

Campag4life

Makes sense to me. You are competing. Believe an aero bike makes sense for you.

hhnngg1

Disagree here. If field testing was as robust, the bike manufacturers would just use real-world numbers to back their claims, as it would be enough. Aerobars vs no aerobars are a good example - nobody even bothers to test aerobars vs no aerobars in a wind tunnel because it's such a big difference that you do not need a wind tunnel to measure it.

There is NO bike manufacturer that will say they have reliably measurable real world benefits out of a wind tunnel. They will leave it to the user to extrapolate the effects to real world, and use their most-optimistic wind tunnel results as data, contrary to what you say.

asgelle

It's a shame that one data point ruins a perfectly good hypothesis. Training and Racing With a Power Meter Journal: Which is faster: the Cervelo P2T or the Javelin Arcole?

What you fail to grasp is that the wind tunnel data (proven to be accurate) is input to a model (proven to be accurate*) which shows the benefit. As long as you provide the correct parameters and conditions, the model is surprisingly robust. It's faster, cheaper, and more precise and accurate to get those inputs independently, as in a wind tunnel. It's funny how no one questions weighing a bike or component to determine which one is faster up a steep hill. Just as a scale provides the coefficient for the gravitational term in the ******ing force, a wind tunnel provides the factor for the drag term.

(and people don't test aerobars vs no aerobars ANYMORE because wind tunnel and field testing have definitively answered that question so people don't waste their time on it. There was plenty of testing in the early days.)


*https://www.recumbents.com/WISIL/Mart...%20cycling.pdf

wphamilton

Only under the specific conditions that can be replicated in the wind tunnel. It's not really comparable to a gravitational field which depends on mass and separation. For example, vibration of the surface will alter the drag coefficient.

hhnngg1

This is from the conclusion/discussion section of the Coggan link you posted, taken verbatim. It is the VERY FIRST sentence he writes, not hidden at all - it is clearly intended to be one of the main points of his conclusions:

"It must be emphasized from the outset that the difference in CdA between the Javelin and Cervelo was so small that it could have been entirely due to chance alone. "


While he does go on to speculate that the results could also not have been due to chance alone, even Coggan recognizes how important it is to put these results in the proper perspective, and thus he leads his entire discussion with this clear caveat.


Again, this is perfectly in line with my repeated statement above that none of the bike manufacturers use outdoor testing results to validate their frame aero benefits, because it's so small that it's essentially lost in the noise of real world variability. See above again for my blood pressure med analogy of why even small wind tunnel differences can be, for all practical purposes, irrelevant in the face of such variations outdoors.

canam73

Where's that Rchung guy. Isn't this his entire existance?

spdntrxi

he's probably laughing

canam73

Everybody have fun tonight. Everybody R Chung tonight.

That makes me laugh.

asgelle

And evaporation/condensation will alter the mass.