Originally Posted by Carbonfiberboy

My interest in putting aerobars on our tandem goes like this:

Most tandem teams, including ours, are comprised of unequal riders. Couples who are equal riders almost always ride singles even though they would blow the peloton away on a tandem. Thus most tandems climb and accelerate more slowly than their friends on singles. Such tandems can ride in a paceline just fine as long as it's flat, but it's seldom completely flat. As soon as the road tilts up or down a little, the combination of tandems and singles becomes a PITA.

To a tandem like us, it feels like the singles put the hammer down hard and accelerate every time they come to a hill, and conversely coast on the slight downhills. If we're feeling strong and the little hills aren't too steep or long, we can give it a lot of gas and stay on the back of the group on the hills, resting in between.

But what usually happens is that we drop off the back of the group and hold station maybe 100' back. That's enough room for yoyo-ing with small changes in terrain. When we hit some tandem-friendly stuff, like a downward trending set of rollers, we'll move up to the group if we've been able to hold station, and then go around them. If we get some clear air, we can either hang off their front or go looking for another group. Doing that, we'll usually take a couple of enterprising folks with us, but it's useless if not dangerous to ask them to pull, so we'll just hammer along, making friends.

So there's a lot of time we could be saving energy with aerobars. I believe a drafting rider saves about 1% of output for every mph of speed. So in a group traveling 20 mph, drafting riders are at about 80%. My understanding is that a tandem has about 150% of the wind resistance of a single, IOW the tandem's average is about 75% of a strong single's output. That still has the captain working harder than the singles. If we had aerobars, we might get the captain's output down even below a pacelining single and could save enough energy to stay in the neighborhood of a group of singles on a climb or put enough time on them so they at least wouldn't pass us so soon.

So that's what I'm thinking, anyway.