Best vehicle you’ve ever drafted?

For touring, a JCB is bliss,
For touring, a JCB is bliss, they do about 20 mph constant and decelerate slowly, nice high exhaust too and with a flashing orange light.

If I make it to the Finchley
If I make it to the Finchley Road on time, I can normally get behind the 4:55 National Express coach going into Victoria. Quite a good tow.

The new ‘green’ London buses are actually pretty good as well, because they have side exhausts so you don’t get a lungful of diesel.

Suffolk tractors are prefect, especially when they’ve got a trailer of potatoes/onions on the back… just watch out for rogue tubers flying off the back.

Otherwise, it’s got to be caravans.

Oh this is my favourite
Oh this is my favourite thing. As one of my team mates once said, when a truck goes past I’m like a rat up a drain pipe.

Out here in the UAE we have a lot of very heavy construction trucks and also water tankers, which are the best. 40,000 litres of water takes a long time to get up to speed and it isn’t stopping in a hurry either so I have no worries about safety, plus the road surface is generally very good.

If I can catch them at a roundabout on a nice long straight I have frequently got past 70km/h before I start to spin out, although I only know that by looking at the data afterwards – it’s not a good thing to be looking at your stem in those moments. I find control and turbulence tends to get a bit sketchy past 70-75km/h anyway.

My absolute best draft was on a long route we do where I got onto the back of a small truck which was loaded with hay bales just at the top of a big climb. I stayed with it for about 30km, even up some climbs which was bloody difficult. Bagged a few KOMs that day !

drafting lorries and cars
drafting lorries and cars should be against the rules – that goes for all motorized vehicles except those sky vans with the peloton painted on the back – in which case, tuck in and make like Brad… B-)

I used to draft lorries down
I used to draft lorries down the bypass. 3 mile dead straight road, ever so slightly downhill but to get onto it was a bit of a crawl over a bridge. If you could get behind a fully laden lorry as it came off the docks and crawled up that, you were onto a winner. The acceleration once it hit the summit was generally pretty steady and the road was limited to 50mph so they were never going full gas.

No junctions, no lights, good surface meant it was dead easy to sit behind them until they hit the outskirts of town. Fastest I ever had was 57mph on the speedo, spinning out 53-12.

Only once did I ever really shit it when I got dropped and the maelstrom of wind and turbulence that suddenly hit me at 50+mph was terrifying.

I got between two lorries once – slipstreaming one while there was another one behind me (he wasn’t there when I started, he’d caught us up en route). I was really worried that if anything happened to me, the lorry behind would just go straight over me but it was all OK. As I swung out into the right hand lane once we were in town (the lorries went straight on in the left hand lane towards the motorway), the rearward truck came alongside me. I thought the driver was going to have a right go but instead he leaned out and shouted “you were doing 50 mile an hour then mate, f***ing well impressive! You should ride the Tour de France!”

🙂

I’ve never thought to draft
I’ve never thought to draft cars as they’re generally not boxy enough to make too much difference.

My favourite was drafting Dudman cement mixers when I worked in Shoreham and lived in Brighton. I could more or less get underneath them and get a free ride most of the way home.

Rob