In my previous blog post I described my experience at the Texas A&M wind tunnel with John Cobb. Drum roll please… The results are in. Nathan Lesniewski, who was working with John Cobb for my testing session, sent me two files via email today:

Nico’s Report (MS Excel)

Nico’s Raw Data (PDF)

In the Excel Report there are three lines in the top section under “Comparison”. The “3T” line is my original position and my original equipment. (Pretty good…) The “Base Look” is my original position but with the Look Ergo stem and the ugly duckling bars. (Significantly worse) The “Final Look” is my new position, but with the Look Ergo stem and the ugly duckling bars. So by comparing the “Base Look” with the “Final Look” it appears that I could save 250 to 300 grams of drag by going with the new position and new helmet.

So the questions are:

1. If I could get my 3T Ventus bars in the same position as the ugly duckling bars, would I save the 250-300 grams of drag from my baseline 3T numbers?
2. Will I lose power by riding in this new position, hence negating the aero benefits?
3. How much time does 300 grams of drag, at 30 MPH equal in terms of time saved over 40k? (I produce about 350 watts at sea level for 40k)

As for #2 above, I plan to do some riding with my PowerTap and see if I can produce good power in that position. My instincts say I can, as it felt pretty comfortable, and I’m flexible. But if I can’t, then raising my bars might be the way to go. A good amount of the drag reduction was due to the helmet and the narrowing of my arms, so I could decide to go with the higher position and narrower arms. I don’t feel like the narrower arm position would affect my power or breathing as I’ve raced like that before.

Any other feedback would be welcomed.

As I was driving to Denver International Airport yesterday I was talking to my wife, Sarah, on my cell phone, and telling her that I was going to miss a day of riding while I was doing my wind tunnel testing at the Texas A&M wind tunnel with John Cobb. I didn’t realize that I’d be doing 4 hours of five-minute intervals. I’m pretty sure I did 17 five-minute intervals inside that tunnel, and some of those were in pretty uncomfortable positions. Near the end of the testing session I asked that they lower the resistance, which they did by putting me in a lower gear. (I couldn’t shift into a lower gear myself because I didn’t have cables on the bike.) I should have asked for that sooner, but live and learn.

My overall impression of this wind tunnel testing was that it was much better than my first testing session in Ft. Collins with Colorado Premier Training. In Ft. Collins, while the staff (Mark Cote in particular, who now works for Specialized) were quite knowledgeable and experienced, I felt like the equipment was duct taped together, the tunnel was “blustery”, and the results weren’t repeatable. In Ft. Collins they only tested me straight-on (zero degrees of yaw) and they asked me not to pedal. Each run lasted about 30 seconds. With John Cobb, at the Texas A&M tunnel, each run lasted about 5 minutes, they had me pedaling pretty hard the entire time, and they rotated me through a range of yaw angles that went from zero to 20-degrees. And I was very happy to see that the numbers were repeatable. Two or three times during the four-hour testing session they switched me back to a previous setup (same equipment and same position) to see if they got the same drag numbers as before. I was quite pleased, and I gained confidence in the testing methodology, because repeated tests were pretty much spot on with the numbers from before. In defense of the Ft. Collins testing program, I was one of the first riders tested there and it’s quite probable that the equipment and the testing methodology have improved since I was there. For example, they did have a rotating platter to test various yaw angels, but it was broken on my testing day so we didn’t use it. I’m assuming that it’s working now and that they do test multiple wind yaw angles.

Similar to my first testing session, I got to witness the wind tunnel test before mine, and the guy “came out 2 minutes faster” than he went in. That really means that “the guy” was way too high to begin with, and John Cobb lowered his bars by about 10 cm. I’m not exaggerating, it really was something in that range. I mentioned to the testing staff that given my Ft. Collins testing session, where they couldn’t make my position any faster than when I came in, that I wouldn’t be surprised if John Cobb and his team also couldn’t get me any more aero. To bolster this fear, when I came out of the tunnel after my baseline tests, several people in the computer filled room said things like “wow, you’re one hell of an aero kid” or “you’re the most aero person we’ve seen so far. It’s no wonder that you can go fast.” These are not the words you want to hear. You’d much rather they say “Holy cow! Your position is like a parachute….” They also tested my 2009 Cervelo P4 alone and said it was measurably faster than the three Cervelo P4s they tested earlier in the week. They attributed it to my soon-to-be-illegal 3T Ventus LTD bars, and my Zipp VumaChrono cranks, and my one-of-a-kind center pull brake. The bike is also fairly small at 54 cm.

After the initial baseline tests they swapped out my non-adjustable, sleek and beautiful 3T bars with a very ugly, not-so-sleek, set of uber-adjustable bars. These bars consisted of a Look Ergo Stem (courtesy of Al Morrison, best know for his tire rolling resistance research) and basically two base bars. It’s hard to describe why it was essentially two base bars, but there was a real base bar, and then the clip on Profile bars extended not only forward, as you would expect, but they also went horizontally pretty far, in effect creating a double-decker base bar. The ugly duckling setup also had rather large, and squarish, clamps on the bottom and were literally the antithesis of my 3T bars. John Cobb and his team then adjusted the elbow pads and the extensions to match my initial position with the 3T bars and ran a test again. I was significantly less aero with this setup, which was due to the far from ideal bar setup. It surprised me how much less aero I was with the same position, but with really ugly bars. I guess equipment does matter.

The bulk of the afternoon was spent trying to reduce my drag by changing my position on the bike. They lowered me 5 cm and noticed a slight improvement. Then they lowered me another 2 cm and got the opposite effect — more drag. So they raised me back up those 2 cm and called that my ideal drop. Then they tried moving my arms closer together and this is actually where they found the most improvement with my position. I have fairly flexible shoulders and in the end they had me riding with my forearms touching each other. Then then tried angling my forearms up, in a slight Floyd Landis “Praying Mantis” style position, and with my body type this was worse than a level extension. I guess that’s good as the Mantis position is no longer legal, either. Oh, and I shouldn’t forget that we did try some crazy positions, including a few where I wore my prism glasses and kept my head entirely down. The prisms change your angle of view by 90 degrees and allow you to look forward with your nose pointing directly down. It turned out that I was indeed pretty aero in this position, especially with my borrowed short-tailed retro Bell Vortex aero helmet (courtesy of Kevin Nicol) but the difference was too small to make it worth the risk of driving a bike at 30 MPH while looking through little mirrors. I also have a suspicion that in a real race those little mirrors would get covered with sweat in about 10 minutes and become useless. Nevertheless, it was a fun experiment. Anyone want to buy a set of prism glasses at a bargain?

Then we moved on to trying different helmets and skinsuits. In a nutshell, the fastest helmet for me was the Bell Meteor II that I’ve been letting Kevin use this past season.And the fastest skinsuit was my Discovery Team Nike Swiftspin skinsuit. My team Excel skinsuit was a very close second, close enough that I’ll continue to use it out of loyalty to my team. And oddly the long-sleeve Garmin-Slipstream speedsuit was the worst. John Cobb thought it looked like a fast suit, and was questioning the data, so we ran a few tests comparing the Garmin-Slipstream speedsuit with the others and it consistently came out significantly worse. This is the skinsuit I let Kevin Nicol use at Moriarty for the National Record Challenge this year and maybe I slowed him down by doing so. Sorry Kevin. Actually, this is probably a good time to mention that John Cobb said, particularly in regards to clothing and helmets, that the optimal equipment choices are super idiosyncratic, and what’s great on one rider might be horrible on another. So in reality the Garmin-Slipstream speedsuit might have been great on Kevin.

Then to wrap things up we went all the way back to my starting position (on the ugly-duckling bars, not the 3T bars) to confirm the overall improvements we’d made. I was happy to see the drag numbers go up, and a bunch of nodding heads indicating some sort of satisfied approval, as the little dots on the computer monitors showed my drag to be back where we started.

The math is complicated. Despite their best efforts to limit what variables change from one test to another, things other than the rider position and equipment do change with every run. As an example, they were shooting  for 30 MPH of wind with me, as that’s the speed I went at Moriarty this year, but the actual speed of the wind appeared to vary maybe a few tenths of a mile per hour from run to run. And the temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure, can all change during the 4 hour testing session, too. So to get really accurate data they need to factor all of those minute changes into the drag calculation equations. It’s possible that John Cobb’s software was factoring those variables into the numbers in real time — I’m not sure. But they were in a hurry to pack things up, and let the Texas A&M staff go home, so our post test debriefing wasn’t very extensive. They said that they would send me the complete report after Thanksgiving, once they had time to compile and review it. As a quick parking lot assessment, they guesstimated that my new position was about 25 seconds faster over 40k than my old position, assuming a good aerobar rather than the ugly duckling.

So was it worth the money and time? Absolutely. There were at least half a dozen races for me this year alone where I either lost a place by a second or beat the guy ahead of me by a second. I had the second fastest time at the Cherry Creek Time Trial, on the final race of the series, by less than one second. Taylor Phinney beat me in one of the 10-mile Lyons to Boulder time trials by 1 second. I got third at Masters Nationals and was only 4 seconds ahead of 4th place. And Kevin Nicol, my great friend and ExcelSports.com teammate, beat me at the National Record Challenge by a scant 3 seconds. So seconds do count.

I’ve spent my testing budget for this year, but eventually I’d like to go test with Kraig Willett of BikeTechReview.com in the San Diego tunnel and see what they can do.

Here are some photos:

Update: These rims are now available, but they are very limited in supply.

I wish I had more time to blog about these, but I thought at least I could post some photos.

• C-4 rims (not available to the public yet)
• M5 flanged front 24-hole
• ExtraLite SX rear 24-hole
• Sapim CX-Ray spokes
• 1153 grams

I haven’t ridden these yet so I can’t give any ride feedback. The rims are very narrow and shallow. They look great, but 24/28 might be the way to go.

This is sort of fun technology — I’m using an eye-fi SD card in my Panasonic DMC-LX3 which is uploading photos to flickr via my CradlePoint portable router connected to my Verison USB720 EVDO USB Modem. I then used Flickr Slide Show to create a Flash slide show of the images.

So now I can walk around the Interbike 2009 Expo shooting photos and they appear live on this blog almost instantaneously. I’m not sure yet if you’ll have to refresh this page, but you probably will, to see the new images. I’m also not sure if the Flash movie will cache the images and XML making it difficult to see the new ones as they arrive, but we will find out soon enough.

If you’d like me to shoot anything in particular, feel free to send me a text message and I’ll try to accommodate your requests. 303 882-8083

I generally ride at 4:30 AM, so when I stared out at 3:00 PM on this sunny June day in Colorado, I figured that maybe I felt off because my body wasn’t used to riding in the heat of the day. I literally felt drunk, or maybe that’s an exaggeration and it was more like I was tipsy, as I started my ride.

I headed up our closest switchback climb in Boulder, Colorado — Flagstaff Road. As I was climbing I just felt off balance, not exactly dizzy, but not quite all there. Then about 2 miles into the climb I looked down and noticed my water bottle cage move in relationship to my pedals. I immediately thought about a recent repair I’d done to my bike to resolve one of those bottom bracket creaks that ends up having noting to do with your bottom bracket. (This is the case with 90% of BB creaks, in my experience.) The day before this ride I spent about an hour trying to diagnose a creak, and in the process of elimination I removed the downtube coupler on my Ritchey Break-Away Ti/Carbon frame and cleaned everything, greased it up, and reinstalled it. This didn’t end up solving the creak, but it was one of the dozen-plus things I did to the bike before finding the culprit; the creak was caused by a set of  bolts that go from the rear dropouts up into the seatstays being loose. (If you have one of these frames I recommend checking these bolts periodically. I didn’t even know they existed.)

Anyway, back to my ride. I’ve always had a little fear tucked away in the back of my head about what would happen if that relatively small coupler were to fail while riding, and as I jumped off of my bike I was almost positive that I was experiencing just that — a broken coupler. But to my surprise, the little black clamp was right in place with no obvious sign of damage. So I flipped the bike back upright, put it down on the pavement and pushed on one pedal while holding the seat and the bars; the classic bogus test that strangers do to your bike as they say “Let’s see how stiff this puppy is”. Let’s just say that the puppy didn’t pass this test; the BB shell moved about 5 inches to the side with very little pressure on the pedal.

I can’t believe that I missed the actual damage to the frame when I was initially inspecting the downtube coupler, but I guess I was focused on a small area and not even considering other possible issues. Also I had the bike entirely upside-down and from that vantage the damage was obscured by the BB shell.

Here are a few photos of the frame:

I’m no frame builder, but it looks to me like there was a cold weld on one side of the seattube/BB joint, and that it failed there first, and then migrated around to the other side where it tore the titanium.

Now to the happy ending. I purchased the frame at ExcelSports.com and they took the frame back from me, without even giving me a suspicious look as I said the famous “I was just riding along” words,  and sent the frame to Ritchey. A week later Excel called me and said “Nico, your new frame is here.” I LOVE the bike, and I’m happy to keep riding it. I love the customer service I got from Excel, and from Ritchey, and I’m glad that it wasn’t the little coupler that failed. And I’m really glad it was my bike that was off, and not my brain. (My balance is fine for now…)

This makes me think of the movie Spinal Tap… “But this cassette goes up to eleven!”

We just got our first shipment of Campy 11-Speed Aluminum Cassettes from Recon. They are BEAUTIFULLY machined, and quite light. They are not as light as the 10-speed, but I’m sure that’s just due to the additional metal for the 11th cog. I’m not sure if most cassette weights are with the lockring or without, so I’m posting a photo of both. We have the cassettes in 11-23, 11-25 and 11-27. All are silver.

We should be getting 11-speed titanium Recon cassettes in a few weeks.

We haven’t had time to do anything other than unpack and photograph these stems. They aren’t shipping the long or the short stems yet, but we’ve got 2 of each of the middle range (10cm, 11cm,  12cm). They come in two styles, and I think they both look fabulous. Sorry for the lack of a review, but we will try to get to it soon. They are light, but not crazy light by any means. They look and feel like jems.

The white faced one on the scale (120 gr) is a 10cm, and the black faced one (129 gr) is a 12cm.

The stems are all +/- 6 degrees.

Edge plans to release 3 more sizes: 75mm, 90mm and 130mm. So the full range will be: 75mm, 90mm, 100mm, 110mm, 120mm and 130mm. But they don’t have a release date yet and it might be several month out before we get any. Edge says the stems have been hugely popular and selling like hot cakes, which is great.

I believe we have the only set of BB30 cups for Lightning Cranks in existence right now. The beauty of the system is that the cranks are exactly the same for BB30 and for standard frames, they just use different cups. The BB30 cups press into a BB30 frame, whereas with the standard Lightning setup the cups thread into the frame. Here are a few photos to whet your appetite:

We’ve put on hold, at least temporarily, our quest to build the lightest wheels in the world. (See our 715 gram wheel project.) For our next few wheel projects we thought we’d explore what reasonable wheels could be built for all around road racing — wheels that are sturdy enough to use on rough roads, light enough for climbing, aero enough to be efficient at higher speeds, and reasonably priced. For the first set we decided to use the new EDGE 1.45 tubular rims, and later this week we will do a set using EDGE 1.68 tubular rims. The 1.45 rims were recently introduced (replacing the great EDGE 1.38 rims) and while we’ve sold a few sets of the clincher version, this is the first set of tubular rims we’ve had the chance to play with.

Front wheel:

• EDGE 1.45 tubular rim, 20 hole
• ExtraLite SX front hub with ceramic bearings
• Pillar 1422 bladed titanium spokes
• Pillar internal aluminum nipples

Rear wheel:

• EDGE 1.45 tubular rim, 24 hole
• ExtraLite SX rear hub with ceramic bearings (Shimano cassette)
• Pillar 1422 bladed titanium spokes (non-drive side)
• Sapim CX-Ray bladed steel spokes (drive side)
• Pillar internal aluminum nipples

We decided to use steel spokes on the drive side of the rear wheel rather than titanium spokes to build a stiffer and stronger wheel. The Sapim CX-Ray spokes are about 1g heavier per spoke than the titanium spokes, so this adds about 12 grams to the weight of the wheel set, which seemed like a worthwhile trade. We used silver Sapim CX-Ray spokes so as to match the look of the titanium spokes and I must say, I think they look great.

We chose the ExtraLite SX front hub over the M5 flanged or straight-pull because it nicely matched the rear, and because it feels smoother and more robust than the M5. Again, if our goal were to make the lightest wheels, we would have opted for the M5 flanged, but that’s not intent with these wheels. Going with the M5 flanged front hub would have shaved another 17 grams off of the weight of the wheel set.

We went with 20/24 spokes for strength and stiffness reasons. My gut feeling is that these wheels would be fine for someone up to about 180 lbs, and beyond that you’d probably want to go with 24/28 spokes, and maybe ditch the ti spokes in favor of all steel spokes. And on the other end, for riders under 160 lbs, you could probably go with 18/20 spokes and maybe ditch the steel spokes in the rear wheel. Unfortunately it’s not a simple equation of rider weight, it also comes down to riding style and longevity expectations.

In the past we’ve mostly posted photos of wheels we built up for customers, but these wheels we built as stock wheels and they are available for purchase if someone wants them. And if no one buys them then I’ll just have to use them myself — drag…. (Please don’t tell my wife)

There are other wheels out there that have a similar profile, and similar weight, but not similar price. As far as I know, there are options from Lightweight/CarbonSports, but they cost considerably more money, and they weigh a tad more, too. And there were options from LEW Racing that were slightly lighter, but he appears to no longer be making wheels for the public, and they were also way more expensive.

I’ve been trying to think of a name for these wheels and it just came to me — “Morgul-Bismarck“. For those who don’t know, the Morgul-Bismarck was a classic Colorado road race with some very tough climbs, fast descents, and howling wind — the exact type of race for which these wheels were designed.

Do you have any suggestions on how to make a better all around set of racing wheels? We will be posting some photos, and weights, of a nice set of EDGE 1.68s in a few days, but we’d love to hear what you think of these…

Okay, so before I go any further, I promised Jason (aka “MadCow“) of Fairwheel Bikes, that I wouldn’t gloat over building a set of wheels lighter than his 718 gram wheels. We didn’t do anything differently than Jason, we just got lucky used a set of rims that were 3 grams lighter than the ones he used. The rims are the newly introduced EDGE 1.25 tubular rims, 20 hole for the front and 24 hole for the rear, and we laced them into an M5 flanged 33 gram front hub and an ExtraLite SX 133 gram rear hub. The spokes are Pillar 1422 titanium bladed spokes and the nipples are Pillar internal aluminum nipples.

The last set of uber-light wheels we built came out at 776 grams and were very similar except that the rims were the original EDGE 1.24 rims and the front hub was an ExtraLite SX rather than the M5 flanged. I can’t comment on how those wheels rode, as they were for a customer, and I can’t comment on how these new wheels ride because we just boxed them up and sent them to another customer, but I will say that these new rims look better to me, and they are definitely lighter. The first generation 1.24 rims were 212 grams each, and these rims were 186 and 195 grams. The ExtraLite front hub on the first set of wheels was 50 grams, and this M5 front hub is 33 grams. That said, I feel like this M5 front hub might be pushing things a bit too far — it feels pretty flimsy. But I suppose that if your goal is the absolute lightest, and you’re not a huge person, and you’re planning on using the wheels for only going up, and you don’t plan to put tens of thousands of miles on the hub, then maybe it’s fine.

It’s also worth noting that we have 8 of these rims in stock, and the average weight is 200 grams — some are a little over and some a little under. While I like the idea of having the lightest, I also like the idea of having a somewhat reliable wheel, so I’d personally gravitate toward the 200 gram rims for my personal wheels. But again, let’s wait a year or two and see how well these rims hold up.  They sure do look amazing!

It’s hard to describe what 715 grams feels like, but let’s just say that some “light” front wheels weigh that much alone.

And I should mention again, these wheels are not for sale — they’ve already been sold. But we do have more rims in stock, and plenty of ExtraLite, Tune and M5 hub options, and we’d be glad to make you a custom set. Just contact us and let us know what you’re looking for.

Here are some photos we took before boxing them up and shipping them off: