How much faster would "x" make me?

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Machin

Regular
I hope nobody minds me posting this here:-

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 from scientific papers published on the subject of bicycle performance...

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!

one point I will make is that whilst the program says that riding on the drops compared to riding on the hoods might be worth X minutes and XX seconds, in reality the actual difference will depend on how high your handlebars are and how low you are when you get "on the drops"... everyone is different, but the program gives you a good idea of how much difference to expect.

Likewise the program says that aero rims might save you 34.5 seconds in an hour long ride at X MPH, whereas in reality some aero rims might make 40 seconds difference and others 30 seconds difference due to differences in the design of the two wheels.

So please don't think that the program is "exact". What it does do is give a quantitative indication of the relative differences based on actual scientific studies compared to just someone on a forum or at the local club saying "this will make you much faster than that", etc etc.

Any feedback appreciated!
 

PpPete

Legendary Member
Location
Chandler's Ford
Miles ?
Feet ?

Sorry - all my riding is metric.
 
OP
OP
Machin

Machin

Regular
I like it - it's a bit of fun. There's a few things it doesn't account for, such as adopting multiple hand positions while out riding, like most probably do. Also, if you have a category for 'under-inflated' tyres, you should also have one for 'over-inflated' as well.

Thanks! Do you mean changing between different hand positions during a single ride? That could be difficult to account for: how much of each position would you typically use on a ride? How much would someone else typically ride in each position? I'll have a think about what I could do for that one....

I think I might have info for over-inflated tyres; I'll add that when I do the next update.

Thanks!
 
Thanks! Do you mean changing between different hand positions during a single ride? That could be difficult to account for: how much of each position would you typically use on a ride? How much would someone else typically ride in each position? I'll have a think about what I could do for that one....

I think I might have info for over-inflated tyres; I'll add that when I do the next update.

I haven't really thought about it before, but in a typical ride, I might spend about 70% of time on the hoods, 15% on the tops and 15% on the drops. In a race, it may be 60% hoods, 40% drops..
 

Octet

Veteran
A brilliant website!

It must of taken you ages to collect all that data, certainly something I'll bookmark.
 
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