How hard is it to beat Remco?

In the past week, Remco Evenepoel won his fourth consecutive World Championship in the time trial. He rode the 39km course at an average speed of 52km/hour – an entire kph faster than his closest competitor. It’s looking really hard to see how someone could actually beat him in the medium term. This got us thinking, how hard actually is it? How many watts are needed at different drag coefficients to beat Evenepoel?

It’s clear that Remco is on another level to everyone else. They’ll all be scratching their heads wondering how to beat him…

How good was his performance?

Fiddling with the various values that go into myWindsock, we were able to achieve a time on the exact GPX file that he uploaded to Strava that’s just two seconds off what he actually uploaded.

Evenepoel has a reported FTP of 425W and we’ll assume a system mass (rider + kit + bike) of 72kg, not that is makes a huge difference on such a flat course. We will set CRR values and drivetrain resistance values that assume he’s on the fastest possible set up. Presumably they weren’t using slow tyres…

This is the modelled average cda of Remco, including some sitting up for cornering and more. The minimum cda is the value recorded in the wind tunnel and reported.

Using the file that Remco uploaded to Strava, we can play around with the values until we’ve matched his time. This gives us an average cda of 0.194 during the course of the TT (however, this includes all sitting up, cornering etc) so during the long flat periods of the TT his cda will be significantly lower. Evenepoel’s reported cda is 0.17 in the tunnel so this chimes with our estimate including him sitting up and cornering.

What happens to the power requirement as we change the cda from 0.194 up to 0.21? This represents a decrease in aerodynamics of just 3.5%.

cdaPower needed for 45 minutes (W)
0.194391
0.200401
0.204409
0.210419
This table of values assumes that every single other aspect of your set up is exactly the same as Evenepoel including system weight, rolling resistance and such. In reality, it’s very unlikely that these numbers would exactly match.

The performance by Evenepoel required him to do an average power of 391W which is 6.2W/kg. If Evenepoel was just 3.5% less aerodynamic the required relative power would suddenly be 6.65W/kg. While W/kg is not particularly relevant for time trials, it does showcase the vast difference that a small change in aerodynamics can make in power requirement.

What about an 83kg rider with a reported cda of 0.19? Asking for an Italian mate…

Ganna rode at an average speed of 51.3kph during the race. Adjusting all of the other values to meet this speed comes out at a required estimated average power for Ganna of 440W for his roughly 46 minute effort. This is in line with Ganna’s reported threshold values. In order to achieve the time that Evenepoel did, we can adjust the power values as Ganna is extremely aerodynamically optimised. It turns out, he’s 15-20W short.

If you want to find out how close you are to Remco, check out the forecast here and plug in your numbers.