Originally Posted by
Machin
I know this is an old thread, but I thought the topic seemed appropriate...
I'm a mechanical engineer by trade and "a bit" geeky. Like a lot of other people I wanted to know how much faster "x" would make me on my bike so I wrote a little program and began gathering as much real-life data as I could... both from my own testing and other people's testing.
Once I'd written the program it seemed a waste to keep it to myself so I registered a little web domain and put it on the web... I hope nobody is upset if I post a link here.... it's totally free to use; just fill in your data hit "calculate" and it'll tell you how much faster "x" would make you on your bike over the same ride:
CYCLE SPEED MARGINAL GAINS CALCULATOR
Because the gains are presented relative to one of your actual rides then the results should be a very good indicator of what you'd expect to see
-as long as you put in the same effort and the wind conditions are the same!
Any feedback appreciated!
Pretty awesome.
I was amused that it calculates that low tire pressure plus dirty chain costs me .5 mph on my rides, which seems like a lot but is spot on with my real life estimates! And also the under-inflated tires is about the same loss as 3-spoke aero wheels would gain, which tells me that those wheels would be about as important to me as keeping my tires aired up. It's a useful page.
feedback: I'd like to see watt-equivalents calculated for each line given the input parameters, but that might be confusing and overload for the casual user. Optionally entering watts instead of time (like the other online calculators) might be a good idea though.