On Bicycles, and.... what else is there?

On Caltrain yesterday, I was surprised to see among the usual set of commuting bikes a SRAM Red-equipped Argon Gallium Pro. The bike immediately stole your attention. The design was one which has been trending: clear-coated carbon with plenty of text detail so the viewer is sure to realize he's gazing upon the result of advanced, proprietary engineering and not at yet another paint job on the same old OEM frames being pumped out of the same old Taiwanese factories. But it worked: the bottom bracket area was huge, the downtube a large-diameter "inverted Kamm tail" design seemingly designed to maximize wind resistance, the top tube a broad, eccentric shape which screamed "vertically compliant yet torsionally stiff". All it lacked were the pencil-think seat stays Cervelo popularized, but this was a machine designed for stiffness over anything else. It seemed dramatic overkill, since the bike was small (the Argon "XS" I suspect). There wasn't muc...

As was pointed out to me by Claude B in the comments section of a previous post, Argon has a new aero frame out, the Nitrogen ( web page here ), and with it they show some wind tunnel data: These tests are following a pattern. The Cervelo S5 remains the standard against which new frames compare, and they may be competitive with the S5, but don't beat it. We saw the same thing with the Parlee ESX and Felt AR1. Then lagging behind is a set of usual suspects, including the Specialized Venge and the Scott Foil. The only test I saw where the Scott Foil did exceptionally well was the test data produced by Scott itself. Between the Nitrogen and the S5 is basically a choice between low-yaw and high-yaw drag. The Nitrogen appears to do a bit better at higher yaw. I tend to err towards lower-yaw performance because of ground shear: yaw at the height of a downtube is less than it is, for example, at head-level, let alone at 10 meters. At extreme yaws control becomes a bigger issue...