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TECH NEWS
Victor_Campenaerts_Ridley_Arena_TT_1 (1)Check out Victor Campenaerts' hour record setting Ridley Arena TT bike
Belgium's Victor Campenaerts, a Lotto-Soudal team member, beat the hour record in Mexico today and here's the bike, named the Flying Moustache in a public poll, that he'll be riding.
The current record of 54.526km was set by Bradley Wiggins at the Lee Valley VeloPark in London back in 2015.
Sir Bradley Wiggins backs Victor Campenaerts to beat his Hour record
The geometry of the Ridley Arena TT frameset is exactly the same as that of Campenaerts’ Dean FAST. Instead of fitting the rider on to a stock frame, the frame geometry has been fully customised to Campenaerts’ ideal position.
The down tube features Ridley's F-Surface Plus which is tech that the brand uses across all of its aero bikes, including the Noah and the Dean. The surface is grooved in certain areas to reduce drag.
"What these grooves do is create a tiny turbulence which causes the main flow of air to better follow the shape of the tube," says Ridley. "With a smooth air travel around the frame, you’ll expertly cut through wind. The stronger the wind, the more you will feel this technology working for you."
The aero bar extensions are designed specifically to fit Campenaerts' arms.
"This process started in January 2018," says Ridley. "Victor was new to the team and eager to test this new technology. We were able to create a mould of his left and right arm, from his elbow to the grips of the extensions. Subsequently this was copied into a carbon version."
The extensions gained UCI approval and Campenaerts first used them at the World Championships individual time trial in Innsbruck last year, where he took the bronze medal behind Rohan Dennis and Tom Dumoulin.
The base bar is astonishingly narrow – 33cm, to be precise (the drop handlebar on a standard road bike is usually somewhere between 40cm and 44cm). Campenaerts will only use the base bar for the first few seconds as gets up to speed from a standing start, and thereafter will just add to the drag, so the minimum he can get away with has to be an advantage.
Campenaerts is currently experimenting with 63x15 and 59x14 gears (Wiggo used 58x14 on his Pinarello Bolide HR). Those two ratios are very similar, resulting in 8.7 metres development per pedal stroke. Campenaerts will aim to pedal at a cadence of around 105rpm to beat Wiggins' record. Of course, that's easier said than done.
The team will take six chainring sizes (from 58-tooth to 63-tooth) and six sprocket sizes (13-tooth to 18-tooth) to Mexico and make the final decision on what to use in the days leading up to the record attempt on 16th or 17th April.
The chainring and sprocket have been specially milled with the aim of reducing friction, and Campenaerts will use a road chain instead of a track chain.
(Yep, we showed you this last month but he's broken the record now so it seems like a good time to break it out again.)
Mat has been in cycling media since 1996, on titles including BikeRadar, Total Bike, Total Mountain Bike, What Mountain Bike and Mountain Biking UK, and he has been editor of 220 Triathlon and Cycling Plus. Mat has been road.cc technical editor for over a decade, testing bikes, fettling the latest kit, and trying out the most up-to-the-minute clothing. We send him off around the world to get all the news from launches and shows too. He has won his category in Ironman UK 70.3 and finished on the podium in both marathons he has run. Mat is a Cambridge graduate who did a post-grad in magazine journalism, and he is a winner of the Cycling Media Award for Specialist Online Writer. Now over 50, he's riding road and gravel bikes most days for fun and fitness rather than training for competitions.
Latest Comments
- chrisonatrike 2 hours 29 min ago
Whassat? Furriers?!...
- Hirsute 3 hours 55 min ago
They were not blocking the footway so not really sure where you are going with this....
- AidanR 4 hours 23 min ago
The point of gears on a bicycle is that you can adjust the speed of the bike without adjusting your power at a given cadence, e.g. when I get to a...
- mark1a 4 hours 54 min ago
Happens frequently here.
- Tom_77 5 hours 22 min ago
I've made the Nice List this year and Santa* is bringing me a Beeline Sat Nav. * or possibly my wife
- Tom_77 5 hours 26 min ago
I got this from AliExpress for £1.76 (although it seems to have gone up to £5.88). They are available in a range of colours.
- Stephankernow 5 hours 45 min ago
You have it spot on, but expect a backlash from Grauniad readers
- NickJP 6 hours 35 min ago
Veer makes drive belts that can be split: https://www.veercycle.com/products/split-belt-pro.
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14 comments
As a bonus, the age-old problem of how to carry two very long baguettes home from the shops has finally been solved:
Looks an absolute beast. I can't get my head around pushing a 60-something chainring at 100rpm+ for over an hour. Metronomonous
That's a impressive bike indeed. 105rpm pushing such a huge gear is mind blowing.
Best of luck to him. Wiggo had the choice to do the record at altitude but preferred to keep it local, Victor will have an advantage, but that's the game. I'm also looking forward to the Huub boys having a crack at it soon, although I feel they'll need a bit of a cash injection to be on the same level.
I assume it's been calculated somewhere, but is there an optimal altitude where the reduced air resistance vs the lower oxygen availability is ideal? Or is the nature of air resistance such that the resistance drops much faster than the lack of oxygen hinders performance?
That is individual to each rider, and their response to the change in oxygen levels vs reduced resistance. It's becoming less and less of an issue with the ability to control humidity and air pressure in modern closed velodromes.
I don't know how much they can control air pressure (Wiggins had to drop his gearing & target lap time as barometric pressure rose in the week leading up to his attempt) but yes, riders do react in varied ways at altitude.
The pros & cons of going to altitude were mentioned briefly in a YT interview with Huub/Wattbike lads earlier this year, as they are looking to attack some world records, including the Hour with John Archibald. I think it was this one.
actually the topic of altitiude was discussed and (as usual) calculated in an FFT video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPgQAL_4ePA&t=6s. However as to the optimum tipping point, that depends on the riders physiology
That is a nice looking bicycle. I don't often like the look of some of the tt bikes, but there is something about that one.
Would anybody be kind enough to tell me why a road and not a track chain?
Best of luck to him.
i doubt the efficiency on a single gear setup is any different, and a road chain is thinner – possibly more aero? – and lighter. is my guess.
mighty. big luck
At altitude huh where we know there's a distinct advantage, can the UCI not just set the paremeters once and for all so we have a true comparison between riders? Given the present position of riders I'm failing to see how Boardman's record shouldn't be the target? If you look at his position I'd say it was probably a slight hinderence to breathing/more painful than we see currently.
Good luck to him, records are there to be broken but it's gone off the boil of late in terms of interest IMO, I think he'll defintely be close and should given he's in his prime and the altitude advantage break it.
They all ride the same bike in the same velodrome on the same day. The same track dimensions and materials, same temperature, same ambient air pressure, same tyres, same pre-race sandwiches...
Where's the fun in that?
Perhaps we should go back to doing it on "Merckx-era" bikes. But if you read Michael Hutchinson's excellent (and funny) book you'll know how silly the rules were, or at least what a nightmare it was working to them. And Merckx set his record at altitude in Mexico City. Are you going to tell him that he was 'cheating'?
Perhaps riders should not be allowed to train at altitude to gain an advantage. Where do you draw the line?
I'm not big on tech for its own sake but I have to say that, for something like the Hour record, the bike is a big part of the story. Waxed chains, milled sprockets, bring it on. But those chainrings... forkin'ell!
Boardman has commented on this, I'm trying to recall what he said. I think it was along the lines that, between the advances made with modern bikes, aero knowledge, fabrics etc, the best riders' CdA now is close to or possibly even better than what he did with the Superman position.
Graeme Obree went to the wind tunnel and found that he was more aero on a modern Scott time trial bike than the Superman position, but not as good as his original tuck position. The article, with really nice video by Endura, is here:
https://www.cyclingweekly.com/news/latest-news/graeme-obree-old-faithful...
A reasonable set of parameters to stick with would be a start, unlike your silly attempt with the same track/same day nonsense.
We already know Merckx was a serial doper, you don't get busted 4 times including three big events in an era of hardly any testing to know that that's not just unlucky. Is riding at altitude cheating, well IMO it is but the rules allow it.
it's same with the 365 day record were the ultra distance lot allow all sorts of things to help sway things for the modern record attempts. You can ride around in circles on a completely flat/zero altitude gain track that's protected from the environment for the mostpart and you can elect to use a completely different cycle altogether that would be the difference between a modern TT bike and a fully enclosed velocipede in terms of aero gains. Or you can be driven to a start point to gain advantage of the terrain and prevailing winds and use a different cycle that gains you massively over an ordinary cycle.
Tech delopment, I've no problem with that as I've said before, but some parameters can be maintained, maximum altitude for one which gives as we know a significant advantage.
I did watch the video previously re the position of both CB and GO, so are we in agreeance that it's actually Boardman's record that we should be looking at re the target and actually the UCI should stop all the fucking about and reinstate it as the record seeing as it doesn't/didn't gain him any aero advantage over the modern day rider?
What is "reasonable"?
My point was that, wherever you draw the line, there will be someone saying it's not a level playing field. The Hour is a bloke or woman riding round in circles for an hour purely to see how far they can go. It's pretty simple already, reducing the variables much further will make it less interesting. The UCI tried to halt progress by insisting on Merckx-era bikes and succeeded in making it unattractive. It's always tempting to want to compare riders across generations but cycling is in part about equipment, whether we like it or not, and equipment manufacturers have a stake in the sport as a whole.
And in the end sport - and life - isn't a level playing field. GB & Aus track cycling budgets, for example, allow they to dominate the team pursuit. Even if we had budget caps or spread the money around every country equally it would never work, that's the nature of competition.
It was hard watching Steve Abraham grinding away through a shitty UK winter on his steel Raleigh while another person attempting the same goal was riding pan-flat roads in sunny, warm Florida. Although I believe Steve was motivated more by Tommy Godwin's record than absolute distance.
Boardman is still the fastest.
Everyone knows it, and 20 years of aerodynamics mean it's not really faster than an optimised modern setup.
Having said that, no-one would have attempted the record if it had been reinstated at 56.3 km/h so we'd not have watched Jens, Dowsett et al. I strongly suspect Wiggins wouldn't have tried it because even Bradley knows that he was very unlikely to beat Boardman's distance.