Ride Faster: Top Tips From Ineos' Aero Mastermind Dan Bigham

today we're going to be talking all things Aero and going faster with Dan bigam and many of you will be familiar with Dan but for those of you who aren't here's a quick summary he's a previous holder of the men's World hour record before Felipe pogana who he then helped to break his own record he's a multiple national champion and he's one of the current team Pursuit world champions on the track now prior to riding he worked as an engineer including in Formula One and he used this expertise and applied it into cycling so much so that he was able to beat Riders who on paper are arguably physiologically stronger than he is he now uses this expertise as a performance engineer for team inios helping their Riders go even faster so we caught up with Dan for a chat at his home in Andorra [Music] good to see you Dan thanks for thanks for coming on the call how you doing I'm doing very well mate yourself yeah I'm all right well just just had a race with uh with Garrett the other day that went that went well um but yeah it was cool now yeah yeah yeah yeah well he said he's gonna have a word with Dave B so you know we'll see what happens um but big question for most Riders what should they prioritize in terms of Aero if they want to get faster to break it back down into the different athletes say you're a climber then you're probably going to be racing up some some steep climbs so you might want to be picking Fabrics that are a bit lighter help more with the cooling side of things because you can make trade-offs because you're not the aerodynamics are less important whereas if you're out in a breakaway they're making sure that you pick the right fabrics for your body for your position um especially things like aerosocks they're going to be incredibly important they're a huge winner probably the best pound per watt Aero upgrader is in the world by by some margin um one of the pair of aerostops cost nowadays 20 grade 30 quid they'll permeate their way through Cycle Sport pretty quickly um they've definitely got a strangle hold on road racing now you see very few people winning road races why is the sock so important so primarily because your leg is seeing relatively clean airflow and your leg is a pretty terrible aerodynamic shape in this cylinder so you can have big impacts on the Wake behind it the low pressure weight by playing around with What's called the boundary layer so trying different Fabrics on the lower leg and have a big big impact on basically turbulent turbulating the boundary layer keeping the flow attached reducing your pressure drag and therefore reducing the net drag on the rider but something I'm a big fan of is the onesie you know the one piece Jersey and Shores now what is the the sort of difference that you've observed between that and and a normal Jersey Insurance not a huge amount to be completely honest I think a lot of it comes down to to comfort I much prefer a one-piece skin suit than than two piece there's less fabric less material without showing drag terms It's relatively minimal because you end up with the same Fabrics in all the same kind of locations just to fit is slightly different so you can achieve a better fitting suit with the one piece than you can with a two-piece so things don't move around quite so much you can place another pockets in the right kind of place you place your actual pockets in the right location but that's more of a one percenter actually so the difference from a bed from Jersey to the equivalent skin suit with all the same fabrics and patterns is actually quite small whereas selecting the right Fabrics the right patterns the right suits you at the right speed is significantly greater which is a harder thing to achieve I can't sit here and tell them say to everybody you need to be track testing or wind tunnel testing um but it is something that if you really take the sport seriously you need to start looking towards I think um that's one thing like with the with pro riders they get a lot of their kits sort of tailor-made I think and you know it's like the jerseys and stuff and for Optimum fit and I think it's much harder for an amateur Rider in my experience to get a jersey and shorts to fit as well as the one piece that tends to then just naturally be smoother across say the tummy area that's something that does occur to me it is something that a lot of clothing manufacturers are becoming aware of I would say and trying to provide solutions that that meet that it's not an easy thing to do though in the world of clothing because you can't stock infinite number of size possibilities and it's quite hard to make one-off of a single garment item but people are trying and there's a niche in the market for it I think um another piece of clothing that I was interested to hear you on is is gloves what's the penalty or benefit of gloves aerodynamically in Road position uh gloves that normal light sort of track Nets the sort of um short fingers relatively minimal like small differences other than going to big big clubs then especially when you're out in the drops and then the hoods not very books in then they can be pretty pretty poor aerodynamically so again it's coming down to picking the choice around the weather don't don't kind of cover all and put your winter gloves on when it's just say 10 degrees because you might be costing yourself a huge amount of performance so it's a bit of a trade-off there obviously you've got to be able to ride your bike break change gears if you can't do that you're probably gonna win the bike race but at the same time you could be cussing yourself probably drugs the reason one of the reasons why asking I've seen a lot of like track Riders inside the Olympics whatever or time trial lists in in height profile time trials not wearing sort of any gloves um as if that might be faster than wearing gloves at all yeah typically is the case for most people gloves are slower on in TT positions this is so it's not always the case obviously everyone's individual and it's worth testing but as a blanket rule probably not faster with slots yeah interesting so another thing that I wanted to ask you is around water bottles because there seems to be a lot of kind of myths around water bottles and a lot of people have heard different things and I think these have emanated from various different sources over the years but you get people going oh water bottle on the seat tube is quicker than a water bottle on the down tube a water like one water bottle is quicker than no water bottles and then some people go no water bottles is the fastest and all this and you get all this like everyone seems to think that they're right but and the reason they're right is because it depends the biggest caveat in the world and I've seen data Every Which Way in fact we did some testing a good few years ago on the belly drone that showed Different Bikes had different results depending on whether you had a brown bottle an aero bottle what it does was the frame designed around it was it not I think most modern bikes nowadays are concerned the fact that most people probably want to have a drink on their bike so they should probably design around having a bottle so if you're buying a bike that's been designed probably the last two three four five years you're probably actually going to be faster with a bottle than without a bottle probably not definitely it's obviously again one year that's a test um but yeah if you go for some of the older bikes where they were designing with airfoil sections in isolation so like for example the two or three old generations of Lo S5 where it was looked looked great in isolation but something you put some bottles on it and they can be a whole amount a huge amount worse whether it's faster on the down tube or the seat tube depends quite a bit on either leg interaction at least for my testing so again I want to test unfortunately and I think this is why so many people have found different results bottles are a fun area though because the UCI have a bit of freedom in how you can use them I think most of the rules they're a bit tight yeah I mean should most people be the sort of Aero bottles I mean people always like we all occasionally get bikes submitted for the bike Vault and stuff where someone's put like Aero bottles on and obviously there's a practical consideration that an aero bottle is less practical than a round boss be on the whole probably uh yeah they're going to be faster than a round bottle their Aero profile they're a narrower profile with a longer section and they typically marry up a lot better with with frame designs or at least modern generation frame designs so if you take a standard round bottle what's the diameter something like 70 80 mil whereas your down tube is definitely not going to be 70 or 18 mil wide so it's not going to be quite so it's cleanly blended into the scripture should we say whereas uh an aero bottle definitely better in that sense however they're pretty unpractical I think anybody who's ridden with one will find out the case so the cage doesn't go around the bottle they tend to Rattle jump out they're hard to put in because you can only put them in in one orientation you can't just throw them in a round cage so they're not so fun to ride with should we say that you see so few people in road races using them very very few and far between because at the end of the day you're stuck as well you've got to be fed by somebody who's got a load of Arrow bottles so you have um like you spoke about briefly then talking about the interactions of the rider's legs and then that sort of having a huge bearing on whether or not a bottle in a particular place is faster in a particular system basically but it's system dependent but something that we often hear from people discussing aerodynamics on bikes or criticizing it is there a lot of stuff in that area doesn't matter and a lot of stuff happening around the drivetrain and around the rear of the bike doesn't matter because that's all dirty air what's your take on that uh they're wrong it does matter there is drag there quite a bit of drag actually the seat post and seat tube are pretty significant it was one of the reasons why with the the new Panera labor lead 3D shr I think is the official term there's a lot of codes on the end but we spend a lot of time looking at the seat poster seat tube that's what I end up with the tubercles you've got a lot of turbulent flow around there but a lot of flip-flopping onset flow angle because of your legs your angle affected your angle to seat you seat post um goes plus or minus say 20 30 40 degrees depending on your leg geometry so there's a lot of interesting things going on there so the more you can deal with that changing onset flow the lower your drag is going to be and most of your drag comes from behind your legs and from behind your back so all the influence around there and trying to clean it up deal with it align with it is definitely going to re-benefit right that's um yeah that's interesting I I wanted to ask if is there any sort of like big Aero mistakes that you see people making or things that are just like when you see a rider doing this you're like oh no yeah yeah there's a few different ones so I think one of the old school Thoughts with it at least it's still persisted within the pro tour Paladin for some while I was lower is faster and you've got to be on the drops when you're on the front and on the drops it actually nowhere near as quick as being on the hoods with a bent forearm so like we were discussing earlier your leg and neck being a terrible safe and a cylinder will so is your forearm and if you're on the drops your forearm is pretty much vertical so you've actually got a lot of drag there whereas if you end up with the same back and a brown position but literally have your forearm horizontal and on the hoods and you end up being a lot a lot faster aerodynamically what's your opinion on bar bags they have a purpose and use them only for that purpose I think if you're you're out touring enjoying the the adventuring side of cycling then fair enough but yeah dynamically they're not going to be too too great a lot of people with like fancy Aero cockpits and you know like nice Aero bars on the front of their bike and then the bar bag becomes a permanent fixture so isn't that an accessible location I can appreciate why they're popular but aerodynamically it's it's not going to be a fast thing yeah I've got some questions about tires the first thing I want to ask is we get a lot of questions about Tire width what is the best tire with what should people be using what's your take on that hires are I guess the next Frontier aerodynamics have stopped have been pretty well discussed I'd say for the past five years or so people talk about aerodynamics pretty pretty commonly whereas Thai is less so they're they're not so well understood and that's not just in cycling that's in in Motorsport and Automotive the world of Tire modeling is is quite a complex one um we struggle with it in cycling now trying to truly understand what happens with a tire how does it deal with with braking forces acceleration forces lateral forces as well to how the things you have slip angles and Camber thrust and then obviously you're trying to optimize tire pressure for Rolling resistance and you go softer and you reduce your damping losses but you're increasing your steering losses and there's all this this massive complexity of optimization I think on the whole most people can run quite large on the rear and are probably going still too large on the front so you can go bigger on the back because it's relatively unimportant whereas on the front it's very relatively very important you see clean flow and and how especially deep section wheel sales is primarily dependent actually on your tire size but what size to go for is hugely dependent on the surface you're riding the wheel that you have what you're trying to race are you in Mad Crosswinds are you super low your angles on the track or even some TTS and go and get 60k an hour and maybe only see two three four five degrees so yeah there's all these different trade-offs to be made and there's no simple this is the way to go say for most people it's probably somewhere in the nice big 23 to 30 mil range which is massive and honestly it's variable and I think I couldn't sit here and honestly say this is the right way to go it's a lot of it comes down to understanding all those different parameters and that's what we try and do within in the Oscar and ideas we try and understand exactly how much wrong resistance is impacted by changing tire size or tire pressure or different surfaces or different wheel depths so in terms of if the optimum Tire width to sort of not wreck the aerodynamics of your front wheel but is there sort of that an interaction that they can look for in terms of how the tire forms around the tire that around the wheel that like is kind of what to go for and what not to go for so Josh Portner who used to be zip wheels back in the day now Silka he he famously came up with the rule of 105 which was back in the day of tubs when a wheel was set size and the tire was the set size unfortunately not different now with with pinches and tubeless because if you're internal rim with changes if you fit a 25 on let's say a 22 internal it's not really 25 mil wide going to be somewhere 27 even 28 mil wide so it becomes a lot harder to make recommendations based on what's stamped on the sidewall and what your wheel size is and even if it says 25 on a sidewall if you get 225 mil tires and lay them flat and measure them beat to beat they'll be different A good rule would say at the very minimum don't have your tire wider than your wrist that's absolute minimum and then the rule of 105 is still large here today holds true you want to be you're tired to be at least five percent narrower than your wheel is at its widest point that's it's a good rule of thumb it's definitely not going to be the optimum for every single one every single Tire different tires have different aerodynamic profiles and flow scriptures depending on what they are they are vulcanized or an open tubular as the other styles typically called so 105 is a good rule but definitely don't go any wide in your room is all right that's good advice uh something else you know we've noticed and there's been a big change like in in Pro Racing is is it feels like this year was the year finally that the pro Palatine embraced um clinches and tubeless over over tubulars the majority of riders seem to be running that now what is the difference say over the course of something like a grand tour if a rider were to use a good Clincher tubular setup versus um the traditional tubulars honestly it's it's scary how big it is the Roman systems difference is like 20 30 and if wrong resistance is probably somewhere in the region of let's say 20 of your total drag maybe even more actually some of these guys 30 40 depending if they're hiding independent all day then suddenly you can have a huge difference you could have a 10 drug production if it all came together in the right right way but let's run with 10 let's say there's 10 total rejection in drag then that's a huge amount of energy 10 to match number then you're bidding off uh let's say three days of riding over a grand tour so two days of riding um but if it was five percent then some of these days an entire day over a grand tour and I'm pretty sure any of those guys would quite like a day off if they could have it that's pretty pretty astounding when you sort of add up the amount of riding that they're doing yeah it's quite an interesting way to frame drag reduction I don't think people often think like oh one percent that doesn't mean anything but if you think one percent if you're doing a grand tour you've got 21 days of racing so one day racing is five percent so if you say one percent then you've you've saved 20 of entire day of riding you just got off your bike with 40K left to go on that that's a really Grim stage because you made a one percent better decision on your equipment choice so it's um it's a nice way of looking at the problem with drug reduction and how to sell those small percent points yeah and you talk about like trying sort of how to sell those those percent points I mean working basically as an engineer trying I guess you have to do that you have to work out ways to sell stuff to Riders to make them think oh yeah I want to use this because we know what cyclists are like they they get ingrained in well this is what I've always used and they're scared to change yeah actually from everybody from club levels like this to World Tour levels like this I've always done it this way and it's a really hard thing to change because I think psychologically you have to accept that you've done something wrong for some amount of time and it's not that's a bad thing just means at that point in time you didn't have the information the knowledge or the advice make those right decisions I think some some athletes are better better than others at adopting change and dealing with change whereas some really find it quite quite challenging quite a struggle um and they're the ones you've got to work with they're the ones you've got to build the relationships with explain the mass of physics everything that underpins it take them on that Journey show them how you how you do tire testing or take into the wintertime and demonstrate the differences because when they're part of it I think they they really feel like they're valued and that those things are being explained to them rather than just like here's a PowerPoint and why you need to change x y and dad go ahead and do it it's yeah that makes sense I guess of the minute is that sort of been you know any examples when you've um and you may or may not be able to answer this but like where you've kind of been able to put something into practice and you've got a rider to change the equipment they've used and then they've been successful doing it by by doing a change and then they've gone like oh you were right you were right Dan honestly really good example I can actually talk about this one is Philippe's our record there were a lot of things that we were doing differently that he was a bit unsure of at first and Filippo is definitely questioning of things because he's been around the blocking of times and he knows that like he needs to understand all these things to implement them so everything from bringing Clincher tires on the track for him as an Italian who'd run Victoria tubs at 220 PSI forever it was quite a change but again explaining the physics are independent the testing we've done and why we thought it was a faster option and then he bought into it it was the same with his gearing Choice bringing his Cadence down significantly from his practice runs he was 105 RPM and we got him down so I think it was 96 in the end there were a lot of other things that match within our record project one strategy the pacing strategy just he'd done things a certain way and it was just explaining the maths and the physics and the testing we've done to to justify why it should be changed and why it should be done in a different way and yeah any people into things and obviously it went pretty far in that hour so he's he's sold now he's he's gonna he's there he's on he's on board with like all the all the attacking stuff there's a few more things we'll get him there there's a few more details which is a scary thought that there's potential to go get him out further well I noticed he was he was using Shimano pedals he wasn't using the the speed place on his bike um yeah it's small I mean uh anything is a sponsored by Shimano and it's mostly he's quite happy and paddle's another interesting one they're quite unique to Riders so we we found the same testing on the track with a lot of different Riders uh through watch out that sometimes speed plays aren't the fastest option it's not a case of it is definitely quicker you've just got to test it but yeah things like the narrow Q factor you run slightly wider Q factor than probably we we would have hoped or aimed towards um but yeah small little details like that I was Keen for him to have a white skin suit not a black skin suit because you get questions yeah well I don't know if people quite appreciate how intense the lights are for broadcast lighting it's quite High solar load it's like the equivalent of a very very sunny very hot day and I think people can appreciate how warm you can get just standing in the Sun or if you can have a white skin see we're on the black the actual amount of energy you absorb it's not negligible on performance I'm not gonna find 200 meters but it wasn't single digits as if it won that yeah I mean I know you've looked into sort of cooling and cycling performance quite a bit but I'm intrigued because you just mentioned it it's piqued my interest because I know that when you were doing practice our records you had sensors attached on and and all the rest of it and it really is something that most people it's not on their radar like most people and don't think about the cooling aspect and the impact on performance at all but how important is it I think the reason people don't appreciate it is because you don't measure at least historically we haven't measured it and people improve what they measure and if you can measure power that your power improves if you measure your weight on a set of scales we'll improve it if you can't measure how hot you're getting then people aren't going to do Implement interventions to improve that but it was super significant and this actually came down to kind of a combination of things selling plate into place to make us realize that so I did practice run on Manchester where I quite literally blew up got too hot we had core temp sensor on and a core temp pill and skin Temp and a few of the sensors around that that made us realize okay it's probably something in the thermal physiology here because we hit about 40 degrees Core 10 which is pretty hot and then after then it's a slippery slope downhill and just soon after that I joined in EOS they have a partner with core or green tag they're a Swiss company who have designed develops and sell the the course temp Center and they have a lot of very intelligent people and they came along to one of our practice hours and started to look at a lot of the interventions that we could do to one get myself cool in advance so core tempers those you can but then also keep myself cool throughout the hour and effectively it's measuring it and the impact was was big so my core tent would go up from say wrestling is 37 37 and a half and I would be over 40 by the end and every degree celsius you increase your gross efficiency go down go down by one percent and when you grow sufficiency 20 and it goes to 19 and then 18 then 17 then suddenly you're costing yourself tens of Watts the more you can keep your core temp down the higher gross efficiency is the more power you can produce which is a big old Factor once you figure that one out it's kind of everything else falls into line of making sure that yeah you keep yourself as cool as you can you're in an air conditioned room you minimize your warm-up lengths by slurries nailing those and then also perceptive cooling as well mental sis Menthol gels it's a small difference but you respond to what you perceive as happening what's actually not what's actually happening so making yourself feel as cool as possible is pretty important the straightforward answer is always wear an aero helmet but then you go well yeah if you're on a hot day and it's a hot climb based on what you're saying you want there's an argument or having the real vented thing that's less Aero but if if you're gonna lose that much on the hot climbs going so slow like yeah it makes a difference and your head's probably the worst place to get hot because that's where you really respond to it so if you have hot feet or hot hands so what but if your head gets hot then suddenly everything starts going on red alert and your body's like no no no no time to shut down this is getting dangerous so if you keep your head cool even if everything else is is cooking you'll probably be able to put yourself well that's his right turn but put yourself into a deeper box just so uh something you've got to be a bit careful of because you can go over over the over the edge thanks so much for for taking your time to chat to us Dan some yeah fascinating insights and stuff um it's been great but uh I'll let you get off what are you doing in Andorra right now uh a bit of training bit of work there's a lot of uh prep ahead of our winter training camps within us so I had there in just over a week's time and get busy getting the guys fast roll them in some glitter polish them up a bit all the best with that I'll catch you later cheers

Channel: GCN Tech

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Id: ab58K2JfhGo

Length: 24min 42sec (1482 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 07 2023