Mobile Speed Tunnel. - is this a crock?

Paul Hough

 So, the mobile speed tunnel in a semi trailer came to the St Anthony's expo today.  You can check their pretty much non functional website at speedtunnel.net.  We all know that wind tunnel data is valuable to pros to set their position, choose a helmet, etc.  But can you build a valid, low speed wind tunnel to exacting tolerances in a trailer and expect to get meaningful results?  I don't know what they charge but I bet it is substantial.  Is this just pure marketing BS in a trailer?  Let the engineers weigh in!

kurshing

It probably can put some primitive numbers to terrible aero positions and the other crap people hang on their bikes...but my guess is that a REALLY valuable set of data might be tough to get from that thing. My guess is that it might be designed to help them sell bike fittings out of the trailer.

(I am not an engineer though.)

Coach Patrick

FWIW, there's a lot of unproven, expensive things in the tri market that people pay for. One day I am going to wise up and make some thing that people don't need but WANT and will PAY lots of money for. I am too practical for my own good!

[Deleted User]

IMO, wind tunnel testing isn't something that most AG athletes need. I agree that it's pretty cool that we have this kind of stuff accessible to us, but I feel that it's a really low ROI in general. After all, we can get nominal aero gains just by spending money on a good bike fit and a pointy helmet. I feel that there's just no need to spend more time and money in validating that, to whatever degree of precision and accuracy that might be available.

 

(Full disclosure: I'm an astronomer, not an engineer. In my field, any number accurate within a factor of 10 is good enough for our purposes. )

Coach Rich

I'm reminded of the venture with John Cobb, about '05-06, that included a $$$$$$$$$$ pimped out semi / rolling bike shop / retail store that would go from race to race...

Dave Tallo

Posted By Patrick McCrann on 30 Apr 2012 07:16 AM

FWIW, there's a lot of unproven, expensive things in the tri market that people pay for. One day I am going to wise up and make some thing that people don't need but WANT and will PAY lots of money for. I am too practical for my own good!

My all-time favorite is the x-lab gorilla bottle cage.  Let me get this straight: you invented a behind the seat bottle system - that isn't really necesssary and doesn't add any value - which created a problem of launching bottles.  So you developed a bottle cage to solve the problem.   kinda an answer to a question nobody was asking in the first place! 

Or, in the words of ST, that will take decades of engineering to undo. 

 



 

William Jenks

Dose of reality: error bars associated with real life conditions are huge. Everything is an approximation.

I'm with Stephen. Might be good enough to tell you what common sense would anyway.

But I think there's a huge amount of garbage wind tunnel data out there as it is. See the PowerTri blog and David Warden's tests, for example. I enjoyed DW's old podcasts, but those data at least FEEL LIKE a load of crock.