I like this picture.

sick video umd! looks like fun! how did you get the stats up there like that?

I got up to 72kph/45mph And it was crazy fast I was scared like hell and the cars didn't bothered with me since I was passing them...

And since the road was just patched up a few weeks ago I was scared I could slip and kill myself and so I kept my line and didn't even tried to move and wished for nothing weird to happen.

magic hour. Probably 7 pm on a summer evening.

After 40 my bike starts wobbling and I put on the brakes. I crashed at around 40 once, and now I am too scared.

re the hairpin comments, one of my fav memories of biking (loaded touring) in the Pyrenees were the descents after doing a Col de whatever. I used to race motorcycles and love cornering, so it was a fracking gas to take cars going into hairpins over and over, even with a lump of a bike.
I too enjoy skiing fast, and as my racing experiences, going fast in or on anything is one of lifes pleasures. I really do get a lot of enjoyment out of it. Goes without saying though that road conditions, bike and tire condition, wind, etc etc all play a part in judging when and where. Time and place sort of thing.
Lets face it, some people just dont have the speed thing inside them. Touch wood everyone.

[QUOTE=Menel;11801966]It's not scary if your bike is well maintained and properly setup. My limited experience has been that bikes are perfectly stable at high speeds, even with the occasional bump.QUOTE]

I replaced the forks & wheelset on my old Litespeed Tuscany last summer & have noticed it feels a lot more twitchy over 35mph. Over 40, it wants to start wobbling. Is this most likely due to the forks (Forte Axis carbon road fork installed by REI) or the Mavic Open pros? I hope to get a Felt AR next year & relegate the Litespeed to bad weather/trainer duty.

That is actually a fun debate. Force is mass times velocity squared, but at least at speed, you have some time to contemplate your landing before you touch down.

even at the go cart vs. motorcycle level, the go cart can corner far better than the motorcycle.
If a car can't corner faster than a motorcycle, then the driver is either chicken or they have a really bad car with bad suspension and tires.

We have this conversation during a lot of our rides. One of our best climbers says he gets sketched out in the mid 30s. Our bigger guys will regularly do 40+ on decents. As a former big guy, I never had to worry about working that hard on downhills and have hit 50.4 according to my garmin. Now that I'm a bit thinner, I can't seem to even break into the high 40s on decents I've come close to 50mph before. Maybe it's a bit delusional, but I don't really worry about wiping out at 50mph any more than I do at 30mph. Either way, I'm going to be hamburger. It's pretty much luck of the draw how badly the crash is going to end.

What is pretty cool is when you are descending Lookout Mt or Flagstaff Mt, and you overtake a driver who is courteous enough to pull over and let you pass.

Oddly enough, my top speed didn't even happen in the mtns;
I was riding West on 128th one day, just getting hammered by a South wind that made it impossible to even hold a straight line.
I was planning to go to 93, but when I reached McCaslin, I decided I'd had enough of the wind so I turned North.
(For you non-CO people, this is "The Wall" of the Morgul-Bismark, but ridden in the opposite direction.)
I didn't even pedal, but hit 54mph before reaching the bottom.

Full size cars have the disadvantage of not being able to use as much of the track as motorcycles, so a motorcycle can make its effective turning radius much wider than a car, which takes up some of that real estate with the width of their vehicle. Look up lap times for the tighter road courses (such as Streets of Willow) to see the difference.

I have seen 65 once, descending the east side of Monitor Pass at 8000' on an 8% grade. It is normal to do low to mid 50s in the high Sierras with the thin air.
Most fun downhill? Lake Tahoe to Carson City on HWY-50. Caught and passed a couple Harleys on a corner. Rest of the descent, they would pass us on the straights, we would pass them on the corners.
I have seen a person lose their life on a downhill, and watched another rider taco a carbon wheel at 45+. Listen to that little voice when it tells you it is time to slow down.

A friend of a friend died on Rock Creek a couple of years ago.

I don't like to think about it.

I get to drive and ride a lot of 180 degree hairpins here in Colorado. On a tight turn, you can't really carry much speed downhill into that kind of corner in a car. You can carry far more speed on a bicycle. This is the kind of curves I'm talking about



On these kinds of curves, the car has to slow to nearly walking speed while a bike can run through them at 20 to 30 mph without problem.

I usually come down US 40 off of Lookout. While you can ride faster than the cars down Lariat Trail, there's just too much braking for my taste. US40 allows for fast, relatively straight, smooth descents...on the order of 50mph +

If you ride the 'Wall' the wrong way...i.e. up... you get a feel for what McCaslin means. It's an old Arapahoe word meaning 'big f***ing hills!'

That's been my experience with bicycles. We can use more of the road so we can carry more speed in a turn.

That's a really nice picture.

fixed

The fastest I've gone is 44.3 mph, but I can't coast to it, I have to work my arse off and spin to get there. There's a long 3% or so hill that I do on my training rides, but I think it's the strong tailwind that pushes me more than the slight downhill pulling me to that speed. I love it.

I should add though that this stretch of road is straight. For me it's not the speed, it's the turns. IMO, taking speed into turns is where the real skill is and what separates the men from the boys. Otherwise, it's just the soap box derby.

48 is my max, on a wet road being WAY dumb. reward for the killer climb up. it wasn't raining, but when I hit the brake to head towards stopping at the stop sign at the bottom, I think I almost locked the rear wheel.

I crashed at 30, and it sucked way less than crashing at 10, but it really scared me.

I was OTB in a road race and had a faint glimmer of hope that I'd make up some ground on the pack when I reached 58mph on a sustained descent. That was until a pack of Cat1,2's (who started ~30 mins after me) passed me like I was standing still.

I wrecked hard on a downhill earlier this year (impact w/ wheel attacking dog --> collapsed fork --> 3 fractured ribs, scapula, collarbone in 5 pieces) and, while I've loosened up some on the downhills, it's still in the back of my head -- and until it isn't, then I'll continue to hold back on the downhills to some degree. Next year I'm taking the 55mph descents to 60 (I have medical benefits from work and no kids. )

Actually, that's energy (1/2mv^2 in consistent units), but the same point.

i never have long descents with winding hairpins. my fast descents are always a few seconds at most in rolling hills. yet i have hit 58mph on a ride without knowing where it happened. it could have been on any one of the longer humps and i'm sure i wasn't at 58 for more than a second or 2. i do hit 40s very regularly and occasionally 50s. no mountains. how i do it, i don't know. even on descents when i tuck, i am usually holding the hoods because i don't want to keep shifting hand positions if it is only a few secs. the only reason i can think of for accelerating so quickly downhill is combination of weight (190 to 200) usually, smooth well serviced hubs, tuck and not touching the brakes at all which is possible if there are no tight turns.

I hit 63MPH on one of my local drops but that was before they developed the neighborhood along it now. No way I would hit that speed there again, much like UMD's video. To many driveways. A car pulling up to the driveway will look both ways see some dude on a bike 500 yards away and think it's cool to pull out -> smash! you dead!

Not mine, unfortunately. Follow the link to the artist.