Oh Dear - When Marketing People Do Science

A little off topic but I thought people here would enjoy it. Possibly the stupidest attempt to quantify aerodynamic drag improvements yet:

"Avanti also has a new time trial and triathlon frame, the Chrono, and a track frame, the Pista. Wind tunnel testing of the Chrono has resulted in a bike that's 57 seconds/hour faster than the 2008 model, according to Avanti, thanks to slotted Jetstream stays, internal cable routing and other refinements. "



(from http://cyclingnews.com/tech.php?id=t.../2009_avanti08)

"Avanti worked with Morgan Nicol of Oval Concepts in the San Diego Low Speed Wind Tunnel on the design of the Chrono. Managing director John Struthers admitted he wasn't sure the company would ever recoup the development cost of the Chrono, but it was clear everyone at Avanti was immensely proud of the very slippery-looking result. "

Hmmm... looks like someone may have some data to actually validate that claim

You are going along with the joke or you need to read it again?

That bike just uses metric time, which will certainly be outlawed by the UCI before it hits the streets.

LOLers.

My brother is a marketing major and I'm a scientist. Now you wonder why we don't get along?

Marketers know the power of a placebo.

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The faster you go, the fewer passing cars

presumably in order to have time go faster, Avanti have also been able to lessen the impact of gravity making the gains in a hill climb TT even greater

I can't believe I'm not in marketing

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Avanti is a NZ company and this is just the latest in hype from a company that is full of talk and short on delivery. Their greatest contribution to the industry is to overstock their bikes and have to flood the market with cheap bikes where no one wins.

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Yeah, I don't see it as being much worse than the efficiency claims made by Specialized, Trek, C'dale, and others regarding stiffer frames. Funny how nobody has ever been able to tell us how many watts are saved by increasing stiffness by X%.

I think you're missing roadie's point.

You can't save seconds off an hour. An hour is an hour. 3,600 seconds. Unless you run on Avanti time then an hour is 3,503 seconds.

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I'm with you (and roadie). Just sayin'...

Alex, you take smart/nerdy humor to a whole new level! I wonder how many folks even 'get' what you're saying here or the brilliance of turning it into a cycling joke. Once again, very nice. <clap, clap, clap>

Much too smart for marketing, I'm afraid.

I actually was looking at that wiki link and trying to work it into the start of this thread. I just wasn't quite smart enough to do it coherently. Well done Alex!

I think 57 seconds per hour make sense.

57s per 3,600s is just another way of saying 1.58% faster.

If the marketing people had said, hey, it makes you 1.58% faster you would have had to think, I wonder how much quicker that is for my 40k TT. Oh, that's about 57s.

Ya, to the average person at the LBS buying a bike, 57s per hour would make a lot more sense than 1.58%. Even though it really doesn't make any sense, if you think about it at all.