Here's an album from my Specialized visit. It was a really awesome experience getting to see the tunnel, talk with Chris Yu and Cameron Piper about the bike, tunnel, and a whole lot of other things.
Gallery linkAs for the actual bike, I thought it was really solid, felt just as good as my Felt AR. I like wringing my hands about bike equipment and setup as much as the rest of you, but once on the bike, I'm pretty insensitive to things like stiffness, comfort, handling, etc. It felt
different but neither better nor worse, just different. I wasn't a fan of the riser bar, only because I like grabbing the bars close to the stem when I'm slowly noodling around, but obviously there's a flat option.
As for the braking... I wasn't particularly pleased with it. It felt like I was grabbing a whole handful of lever before really noticing a significant slowdown.
I'm okay with concessions to aerodynamics so long as the function is maintained (e.g. under the BB brakes are something I'm 100% okay with because for me there's no functional loss), but I didn't feel like these brakes had that.
Caveat: I ride HED Jets, so I'm used to really great aluminum brake tracks, I don't know how much of the braking performance was due to riding carbon clinchers again (I rode 404 Firecrests for a while, but have largely forgotten the feel) vs. the brakes themselves.
I asked Chris about fitting the Turbos vs the Turbo Cottons for any gain in speed. Tom Anhalt apparently just spent some time with them so I'm interested to see what comes out of that.
His previous analysis showed that switching to the cottons would result in a less total drag+rolling resistance, I'm just not sure if that aero drag plot was for the CLX64, which was designed as a system with the non-cotton Turbos.
climbandpunishment wrote:If you could, ask them what the free stream turbulence levels in the tunnel are, and see if you can tell where the tunnel pitot tubes are mounted. I'm really curious to see how applicable all the WinTunnel videos really are to real world conditions. Not sure if they'll feel comfortable answering, but it's worth a shot. Thank you, and have fun; I hear it's a great tour!
The pitot tube you can see
here and
here. Cam said the free stream turbulence levels were "low," unfortunately, I didn't have enough time prior to visiting to research tunnel design that thoroughly so didn't have any idea what specifically I should be asking about that.
who_intheworld wrote:I'm curious about the wind tunnel test comparison without bottles.
Since the sprinters seem to throw their bottles away before the final sprint,
I want to know how this affects the drag of each bikes.
I asked Chris about their doing this, and he mentioned they've seen a 1-2W difference between bottles and no bottles with the VIAS, the bottle shielding of the frame appears to be very good.