Due to a very serious spinal injury, myWindsock founder Ben, had 12 months without cycling. He returns to cycling 5Kg (11 lbs) heavier. How much slower can he expect to be? See the Instagram post below.
We are all about real world riding, so we picked a very typical 25 mile course, on an average UK spring day. This course has some small ups and downs but would be categorised as flat. You can try the course yourself here, J4/8.
Our experiment was acrross 3 power ranges, 100, 200 and 300 Watts. Look at the chart below to see the differences between the powers. The differences are considerable. Remember, the time affect of a resistance compounds the slower you are moving. Less power, greater cost. No more, “I’m too slow for that upgrade” 😉
Often cyclists are surprised by how little time weight costs on a flat course. We are told lighter is always better and to upgrade to the lightest components. As you can see losing weight will have an affect on your speed, but we hope this will keep everything in perspective when making lifestyle and financial choices.
How to try your own experiments
The beauty of myWindsock is that all the variables are accounted for, Physics, Weather & Performance. This allows you to get real world test results in a virtual environment.
Simply pick any route from your “Activities & Routes” menu.
Set the date and time of your experiment for the most accurate cycling weather.
Hello readers of the myWindsock blog, lately you’ll have noticed we’ve been a little quiet here. This is because we have been working on partner content with CTT and NoPinz but we are back today and I (Tom) have signed up for a TT this coming weekend! I thought it might be a good opportunity to do a mini series on how I will use myWindsock to get ready for this TT, predict my performance and plan my ride.
The race is a road bike time trial – this means I’ll not be allowed a TT specific bike or helmet – as well as restrictions on the kind of wheels I can use. It’s a 15 mile time trial on the H15/10 near Maidenhead.
Luckily, I’ve done a few road bike time trials so I have plenty of previous data to help me prepare.
Predicting the race duration
The first step is to figure out roughly how long the race is going to take me. For this, I’ll need a cda value to plug into myWindsock. Using a time trial I did in August last year on my road bike I can get a value for my cda which will be relatively accurate. The stats from the race are below…
I didn’t have a great day averaging a lower power than I wanted, but the race has come in handy as I can use it to hopefully have a better day in future! A good example of why getting out to race is rarely a bad shout! From this race we can use my live cda plot to predict performance at another TT.
This plot shows us how cda develops with time and generally there’s a couple of key takeaways from it…
My cda on descents doesn’t vary a huge amount, but does get slightly lower as I go down hill.
I sit up way too much on faster climbs – this is something to avoid in my coming race.
My flat cda is around .253, descent cda around .247 and climb cda around .270.
The second step is to figure out how much power I can do at my race. The previous race we used to calculate my cda wasn’t representative of my abilities at the moment but recently I’ve done a critical power test. The outcome of this test put my critical power at 360W bang on – this is the power I’ll aim to average during the course of my TT at first and make micro-adjustments based on predicted race duration.
Plugging these numbers gives me a time of 34:39, or a speed of 43.2km/h… Stay tuned for tomorrow’s blog on my power plan, with a weather impact of 4.5% predicted, he who rides the smartest in the wind will prevail!
If you’re reading the myWindsock blog, or came across this from our friends over at NoPinz it’s likely you already know what a skinsuit is and you might even be sold on the virtues of their number pocket that saves you watts. If you attend a local time trial, it’s likely the pointy end of the field will be in a skinsuit and these days, most people wear one for all forms of racing. The uninitiated, or even those of you that only take part in the skinsuit wearing because everyone else does, might be left wondering why people wear these? Surely a jersey and shorts is more comfortable? It certainly makes using the bathroom a little easier. We know a skinsuit is faster, but how much difference will it really make on race day?Â
With great partners like NoPinz, we are able to get a hold of some data that tells us how many watts a skinsuit saves a rider and this can be converted into a change in cda. That’s all fine and good – but still doesn’t mean much on race day. What we really want to know is how much time will this save us today, or on the day of our race? During his hour record attempt, GCN’s Ollie Bridgewood used a NoPinz skinsuit to save himself a whopping 20W. These numbers are seen across the board and a ten percent reduction in drag due to a well fitted skinsuit is commonly seen.
Here at myWindsock, we specialize in turning data into information giving you confidence on race morning. Cycling is an uncertain sport and anything that can reduce the noise in the information that drives your decision making is valuable. By making use of our physics engine, we can calculate how much time a skinsuit will save you on a particular course.
A worked example – the Perfs TT
For our simulation, we will use two runs of myWindsock on Sunday’s open time trial which is being held on the Portsdown Hill circuit. We have fixed the cda at 0.220 for the first run and, while keeping all other variables fixed, we will reduce the cda to 0.198 for the second run. This is roughly the proportion of savings a skinsuit will achieve – worth around the 20W that Ollie was able to save with his Flow skinsuit from NoPinz. For this, our test rider is pretty handy – being able to maintain 325W for the duration of the TT with a system weight (bike, rider and equipment) of 80kg.
Test run 1: cda = 0.220
Our rider is coming in at a shade under 39 minutes with an average speed of 41.1kph – not bad! Let’s improve his wardrobe choice slightly and pop him in a NoPinz skinsuit and drop that cda.
Test run 2: cda = 0.198
The savings are huge, more than a minute! This is just the skinsuit too, imagine the cumulative savings from pacing, optimised position and other equipment choices. Slower riders will also achieve greater time savings for the same proportional saving in aerodynamics. As we can see, a skinsuit is worth it.
If you want to see how the watt savings touted by brands turn into time savings on your local TT course, they’re all available in myWindsock pre-loaded. Just hit Activities & Routes, UK Time Trials, and then scroll until you find your open TT! Or simply go here UK Open & Club Time Trials. On top of this, you’ll be able to see what kind of power is required for whatever performance level you are targeting.
To mark the first British Open time trial of the 2023 season, we were happy to help Cycling Time Trials, the British governing body for time trials, with a bit of data.
To find out the difference between Winter and Summer, we ran a simulation for every day of 2022. That’s 365 times around the Ely & District course! We ran the myWindsock simulations at 300 Watts, 80kg, 0.200 CdA. Here’s what we found.
Each orange dot is a simulated time based on weather conditions. Each day of 2022 represented.
You can see from the above graph the day to day the variability of times for the BS19 course due to the weather. Time range from 55 minutes in Winter Months to 53 minutes in the Summer.
Another thing to note is the seasonal day to day variability, that is the difference between two days of the same week or month. In the Winter we can see this is around 60 seconds, however times are a little more consistent in the Summer at around 30 seconds. Good job myWindsock give’s you the tools to measure the impact of the Weather.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t a gift day. In fact it was around 1 second slower than Ed Laverack’s KOM day! We’ll call that one even. Air Speed is the speed of the airflow around the rider. We’ve shown the speed difference from ground speed here.
Overall power was 8 Watts higher, giving Tom a 24 second advatange. That’s a huge 6.6Watts/kg!
Next an assumption on System Weight. That is the weight of rider, bike and kit. Rider stats show Tom as 1 kg lighter. This finds Tom another 15 seconds.
Now the big one, Aero! Tom finds a massive 72 seconds. Reducing air resistance from 14.3% down to 10%. The aero Tom has here, is the equivalent to a very well tuned Time Trial Bike position. So we’d assume some assistance here.
How fast would your Sa Calobra time be?
You can find your own time on Sa Calobra, simply by loading the myWindsock forecast. Check out the Sa Calobra Strava Segment
