It's all about the bike

How I got beaten by some old guys on fancy bikes.

I'm trying to design the fastest bike in the world, with the help of some very knowledgable friends. Being greedy I'd at least like a shot at riding it to a new world speed record too. So as part of this I've been learning to ride a recumbent bike.

Now you may have precpnceptions about what a "recumbent" is, or you may have no idea what I'm talking about. In short: conventional cycle racing is heavily regulated when it comes to bike design. There are lots of fancy materials (but a minimum weight limit for road racing at least). There is talk about all the difference a degree of head angle makes etc., etc. But at the end of the day the differences in performance between two decent bikes really isn't much. as Lance Armstrong's biography is famously entitled: "It's not about the bike". Even though I won't deny the appeal of a nice shiny carbon road bike with fancy wheels and a nice groupset.

But in the Human Powered Vehicle (HPV) world things are very different. You could ride a conventioal "diamond frame" (or "safety bike" to use it's original title). You could use a rowing action to power your machine (not popular). Or you could ride a low racer (shiny and carbon framed if you wish and have the cash or know how) with your bum a few inches off the ground and around a third of the frontal area of a normal racing bike. This kind of bike was used to break most of the major world records in the 1930s. Then it got banned from regular competitions by the UCI.

On Sunday I joined the British Human Power Club at Castle Combe mtor racing circuit for a 2 hour endurance race. I rode a borrowed Kingcycle Wasp: a machine that was once HPV state of the art. I knew there would be faster low racer bikes there, but I figured a pair of strong legs and good size lungs would make up the shortfall. I didn't expect that after an hour spent mostly in the (rather minimal) slipstream of a couple of wiry, wily old guys, I would be spat off the back and limp around for another hour. During which they would lap me. Twice!

One of them was Mike Burrows who is famous in cycling circles for designing the Lotus bike, ridden to an Olymic Gold Pursuit medal by Chris Boardman in the 80's. You could say he knows what he's doing when it comes to designing bikes (all three of the guys ahead of me were riding his "Ratracer" design), but it still hurt.

Looking at previous race results, they were riding at an average speed of about 25 mph. But they weren't the fastest. The serious guys were riding fully faired machines at about 30mph. For 2 hours.

Time I got a better bike.