Are Aero Bike Really Worth it? An Aerodynamics Expert Reveals the Truth...

how important is Arrow is it just for the prose is it wasted on normal cyclists like us or can we all benefit to find out in this video I had a conversation with Nathan Barry who has a PHD in applied aerodynamics and works with candel as a lead design engineer he developed a brand new Super 6 Evo which launched just a few weeks ago so before we dive into the details of brand new bike can we talk more generally about how important Aero is I mean some people say it doesn't make any difference they don't write fast enough or the hills don't need arrows so can you talk about that yeah absolutely I'll give you the cliff notes it can get complex but the simple fact is that uh for most cycling aerodynamics is the biggest piece of resistance that you have to overcome I think people lose sight sometimes of where all your power goes if you're someone with a power meter uh you know you have these numbers displayed but people don't think where those numbers are going so on a flat Road on a you know a good road bike with good tires 80 90 of your power might be going into just overcoming aerodynamic drag so if you're talking about you know often the fun part of cycling of going fast you know most of your power is going to be aerodynamic dragged so when you're talking about a bike even though it's one part of the system you can save five ten percent of drag on the whole system just by optimizing the bike alone so if you think about 10 Improvement in efficiency is equivalent to 10 more power basically so that's a huge like boost in performance if you can get those kind of big gains which are possible if you compare something like the new Evo versus you know a more traditional like round tube round seat post type design and can you get it gains at lower speeds because lots of bike around took about 45k an hour sort of speed which Pro do but for Immortal riding 30k now so do we still get the benefits of the low speeds yeah absolutely so uh my sort of like quick and easy measure here is if you do the maths on all the terms at 15 kilometers an hour on a flat Road 50 of your energy is overcoming drag and then that number obviously keeps going up the faster you go because aerodynamics is proportional to Velocity so you know even when you're just like cruising around town if you're on you know something that's efficient tires and things like that like City bikes often have chunky tires and wheels so there's some other things that play but on a road bike you know basically anyone going for a road ride has to push a lot of air out of the way so as soon as you're moving you're having to fight the air and that's why aerodynamics kind of is an important factor at all stages of Road riding because even when you're going up a hill it's not the biggest piece of the pie anymore because the hill is kind of the big draw but you're still moving forward and anytime you're moving you're having to push through the air and so that resistance is always there so certain gradient or percentage where sort of Aero kind of stopped becoming the factor and weights from Gravity takes over um obviously it's a trade-off right so it's like how much aerodynamics are you saving versus how much weight there is the white versus error thing depends a lot on the proportions of each right like how big the error reduction is how different the weight that changes um so a pretty simple rule is if you take a one kilogram change in mass and don't change anything else for a typical Rider going up say a eight percent climb like a very difficult climb one kilogram might be in the vicinity of three watts of power like it's not a very big amount and that is basically because the bike is sort of a small part of the system this is what people tend to forget a little bit about bike weight is that when you're figuring out how much power you need to climb a hill most of that energy is getting yourself up the hill so you know for normal people you know a bike is maybe 10 of your weight seven percent of your body weight so as a system if you save one kilogram off the bike that's a huge difference for an eight Kilo bike say versus seven kilo but for a 70 something kilo Rider plus a seven Kilo bike changing a kilogram is like 1 one and a half percent so if you think about that weight saving you know that's kind of the proportional change in efficiency um and so you know a kilogram is very easy to offset in terms of aerodynamic savings and then when you get to a bike like this basically we're what we're trying to achieve is how do you have your cake and eat it too so you get all the arrow savings without having to give up anything on the other side and come to the buy which is the most important part of the bike the wheels the frame four handlebars information of all those yeah which is most important I I guess I don't have a good answer because it's kind of everything working together okay um when we approach this it's taking learnings from our previous generations of bikes sort of from system six and third generation Evo we learned a lot about each element um and I'm able to go through and break down so obviously some parts of the framework more than others so things like the top tube not at all affecting the drag because it's parallel to the flow and it's behind a whole bunch of other things but the front wheel the four blades the seat tube these things are all seeing really high speed air and so those need to be working efficiently but in the context of the bike it's really about you know the design process was looking at each element and thinking about how do we optimize this the best so there's you know Design Elements there's mechanical elements and there's aerodynamic and so for certain features it's like okay if we take the seat post as an example all right we know we can hit certain mechanical sort of benchmarks so how do we make it as aerodynamic as possible and how does that limit us so you know as a little case study there the seat post is really narrow on this bike it's probably one of the narrowest on a road bike um and that allows us to have not a particularly deep seat post so it keeps sort of a more classic aesthetic but then that forced us to change other things like move the do2 battery which is extremely common to see in a seat post but then we're sort of re-shuffling those things because we've got that as a priority so it just kind of shows how you know each of these decisions trickles down to other parts of the bike so you sort of have to understand the whole package and how they all work together and talk to one another yeah keep it a dit back from the down to you in the port which I've never seen before not quite a clever solution to that problem we're putting the seat button right and then obviously it's convenient if you travel so or or just if you're tinkering right like when you've got a new bike and you're trying to get the saddle height just right being able to move around with those things and not risk accidentally dropping a wire or whatever when you're out riding so okay um yeah it's got it's sort of you know sometimes when you change the Paradigm you stumble onto something that's even better than before not just like a compromise or a workaround it's like oh actually there's another way we could be doing this okay when it comes to Performance how much far to the nil black and housing compared to the key Rivals like a specialized Trek and so on so that's sort of my vision when we started this just conceptually was like how do we make a race bike that can be ridden everywhere but doesn't sacrifice on aerodynamics so that's where it was sort of took the last chassis and looked at how do we turn this into a 6.8 7 kilo race bike but keep Aero performance so I wanted to be able to match our competitors dedicated Aero platforms but in something that was you know what people expect for their climbing bike um so in our testing we've benchmarked against a lot of things but from a lot of the key competitors like specialized tarmac trekomonda this is quicker than that and I'd be confident that most of our EF Riders are going to be lining up in the Peloton with probably the fastest bike and not giving up much weight on any given day and how close is it to the system six your pure air bike does that mean is this so far the error bike can no longer need it in the range is my goal and I pushed it to myself to see you know in this development how far could we take it so we didn't quite get there um this is about kind of two-thirds of the way between EVO 3 and system six it's a sort of abstract reference but EVO 3 was already pretty competitive this has now taken it to kind of hitting the Benchmark kind of of what people consider a low drag race bike and then system six has a little Headroom above that so if you're a sprinter or you're riding purely flat races um or you're just somebody that you know that's your terrain or that's the way you like to ride the system 6 still offers some benefits to that person but for most Riders most of the time this bike's kind of going to be everything you ever want and need more fast enough I guess what stopping you from getting to the same area performance at the system 6 what other sort of hurdles in the way uh a lot of it is that balance between weight and aerodynamics and you need surface area to manage the air so um if you take like a classic aerofoil profile from a wing for example it's like this very long slender shape that's kind of the best way to move through the air so obviously we can't do that practically on a bike but if you put this side by side with a system six the down tube here is maybe 30 shallower so that's like okay you know 30 less surface area or more than that but significantly less surface area so in the case of carbon structures like this you know we're pushing materials at the same time as the rest of the design so you can only take so many layers of carbon fiber out of a tube before it just doesn't have the strength anymore so if that tube is really big you still have a fixed number of layers so you can only take so much weight out of it so that kind of goes for all the parts so you know the down tube the head tube the seat tube and the forks are all not quite as deep as they could be um and so that's where you're playing this right off where you can't quite get to like the very tip top of that performance and you have to make some sacrifice but we think that uh making a bike that's this fast that you can ride you know uphills on Every Mountain Stage is going to be the perfect blender performance um and some of it comes into components as well so Wheels is a pretty big deal so the wheels here is kind of the same philosophy as the rest of the bike these are 50s uh trying to get even more performance than what we had last generation but in a lighter package so they're a little faster and a little lighter than the 45 millimeter deep Wheels we had last time but they still live a little bit on the table compared to the 64 mils that we spec on system six um and again it's just more surface area more material so you're facing that weight versus aerodynamic argument I talked about before and at some point you have to kind of draw the line of where do you balance those okay you know keeping the weight exactly where we want it and where I think a lot of Road Riders sort of expect a race bike to be and then basically extracting every little bit of aerodynamic optimization out of that sort of fixed goal as we could do you look at what Rye was doing I specialize and tracks and look at what they're doing and not take inspiration but think that's a good idea or what they're doing with that design I think help but do that right like I'm a black fan I've been riding bikes my whole life basically and so I just love seeing other other bikes out there and people riding them so I can't help but look every time I see somebody ride past so yeah you can't help whether it's conscious or subconscious I'm always looking at what other people are up to and different companies have different philosophies about how they approach certain problems whether it's you know more emphasis on shape or Aesthetics or more emphasis on performance but um certainly there are Brands out there that you know have excellent talented Engineers that are solving the same problems that my team are trying to solve so we're all approaching them with our own different perspectives so I think it always helps when you're looking at things um you know see who's doing something better or different to the way you are or maybe who's doing something that you don't like that we then want to take on and say like this we don't think this is good enough for what we want to ride you know being a rider it's easy to look at a bike and be like if I don't think it's good enough for me then we should find a better way to do it yeah and it seems like we're getting to a point where you can almost have a lightweight bike and an air bike and it does everything you don't need two separate bikes anymore we're not quite there yet we're getting there aren't we I think yeah I mean that was basically the dream for this thing was can we make something that's you know kind of does everything as good as you would ever need um there's always going to be room to push those boundaries more like for example this is not going to be the lightest bike that you can build but if you do build a really light bike you're going to sacrifice a lot of speed so you know it's I guess it's what you want out of a bike I think something like this as a package is probably going to be the best all-round experience that people will enjoy but also the fastest you know you can make a lightweight bike that's like you know from England people love to do their Hill Climb custom builds but most of those bikes are not that nice to ride no so you know you can you can push it it's like a TT bike right like we can make really really fast bikes but I have TT bikes and I love them but I don't want to ride it on a weekend with my friends yeah no I mean yeah yeah very compromised one thing yeah there's sharper that you make your focus the more you have to compromise on other elements basically and as much as you know road bikes are all about racing but we want to do a lot of different riding with them you know like the the capability of a modern road bike compared to one from even 10 years ago is a great example of that like this bike will comfortably fit a 32 millimeter Tire if you choose which that's basically a psycho cross Tire 10 years ago no one would have put that on a race bike but you can put that on this and go ride gravel roads and you know what you'll be pretty comfortable yeah and you're still going to be going blisteringly fast so Pros don't require it comfortably but us people buy an advice detail Comforts how do you uh factor in Comfort when designing a race bike for the pros also for Wicked Warriors yeah I think uh that's something that's evolved uh like David and Sam on the product team like to talk about Evo having a good history of a smooth yeah sort of compliant ride so that's something we try and Preserve in all of our race bikes we have a good lineage of good both good handling and comfort and so understanding what elements go into that so that we can preserve them in each new iteration because the last thing you want to do is make something new but then give give up something that you had before we're always trying to build on what we already have so um we have a pretty good understanding of road bike sort of compliance and comfort if you take a look on the gravel side at like topstone with its Kingpin sort of active rear end system it's kind of doing a lot of very complex things with a system that you never have to think about and so you know some of that understanding of how bikes are moving feeds into our road bike design across the board so we we're always thinking about those elements it's you know you know head shoot stiffness and bottom bracket stiffness have kind of been the talking points for a long time and then seated vertical compliance is something that we test on every new roadblock design to make sure we're hitting what we think is the sweet spot for you know a Performance Bike um in the case of the pros I think they kind of appreciate that a little bit as well especially if they're racing classics yes this is a bike that'll get raced everywhere so they'll write it at Flanders and Ruby and put slightly bigger tires on it and then people like you and me get to ride around fast and comfortable and just having a great time it's like okay still space for white eyes in there so you can fit the fat tire in there and whatever comfort you want yeah I think I've run 32 millimeter tires online a couple times and it's uh it's crazy compared to the Gen one Evo which maxed out 25 I think let's see how far they come yeah yeah it's been a big change yeah um last question I know you finished your bike you've probably started on gen five yeah can you give us any indication what to expect in next five or ten years and is there anything the UCI will sort of holding you back from making that next step uh I guess the first thing I would comment on is the recent changes to the three to one rule and things like that I get asked that you know a fair bit at the moment okay just clarify what the history of your age sure so if you're not familiar there has been a rule from the UCI for some time which means that tubes have a set aspect ratio which is three to one so the length can only be three times the width or depth depending on your orientation so if for example if it's 10 millimeters wide it can be no more than 30 millimeters long so you sort of had this slenderness ratio and that Rule's gone away um so in theory I could make the seat post like keep going and come back all the way to a point wow okay um but does that make a better bike so that kind of comes back to what I was talking about of understanding the trade-offs here if you make all of the tubes very deep and very thin they become increasingly stiff in that axis which is not the axis that we're particularly interested in for a bike so you then have sort of less balanced torsional stiffness more stiffness in an axis that you don't want and all of that extra surface area which adds weight so how much does that get you in terms of aerodynamic gains and in a lot of cases it's not that much if you've got shapes that are working very well adding a lot of depth doesn't necessarily help you that much like if I just make this Fork twice as deep I'm probably allowed to now according to the UCI but does that make the bike better probably not and then it's a question of how much drag might you save versus weight um so for a bike like this you know maybe I could make certain parts of the fork you know it's it's I think it's going to be more around the edges it's going to be certain uh areas where we're like diving or skirting around the rules to like make sure we can form now we might be able to sort of smooth things out a little bit okay but I don't think you're going to see a a rapid change in the way blacks look just because that rule has changed um and if you do I would be very interested to write it because I think it will have some pretty interesting characteristics

Channel: David Arthur - Just Ride Bikes

Views: 81,861

Keywords: cycling, bikes, road bikes, gravel bikes, mountain bikes, tech, reviews, bike reviews, cycling reviews, bicycles, cycles, gravel, Tour de France, carbon bikes, aluminium bikes, steel bikes, what road bike, what gravel bike

Id: fQS0LuY5EwQ

Length: 18min 30sec (1110 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 13 2023