I said:
Originally Posted by staehpj1
82.3mph and a weight of 60 pounds was mentioned for Diablo II. I am pretty sure these are "flying start" times right?
And you replied with:
Originally Posted by
feijai
They are not. The riders get up to speed on their own, at which point they are timed in the traps.
Actually the times listed are "flying start" times. I just looked them up and sure enough they are listed as "flying start" times. Don't believe me look them up yourself. Flying start does not imply that they didn't attain that speed on their own, but merely that they are not timed except in the traps. I had suggested that they were assisted in attaining speed in an earlier post and acknowledged the error in the post you were quoting.
My original point was that this is a very specialized example with little in common with the riding that most of us do. I know that most of the riding I do involves lots of accelerations interspersed throughout the ride and lots of elevation gains and losses. These real life factors make weight a much bigger factor for this riding than either the time trial example or the HPV example.
None of this pointing out my ignorance of HPV's or yours of what "flying start" means is all that relevant to the point I was making anyway. That point is that Bacciagalupe was making an argument about the effect of weight on normal riding by using a couple extremely specialized examples that both were limited much more by aerodynamic drag and much less by weight than most other forms of riding.
Bottom line, I still fail to see how riding a 60 pound streamliner through traps 200 yards apart proves that weight is not important in regular "normal" riding of the sort many of us are likely to do..