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

Here's a finish line photo of the final stage of the 2015 Amgen Tour of California: I love photo finish images because the "x-axis" which is usually position in most photographs, is time instead. There's only one spatial dimension. The camera records a slit image of what is crossing the finish line at a given time. So if you measure the "width" of a bike crossing the line, that's how much time it takes for the bike to cross the line. If I assume all bikes are the same length, then speed is inversely proportional to the amount of time taken to cross the finish. Here's a typical bike geometry chart, in this case for Trek's racing bikes, which have "H1" and "H2" geometry. Note the wheelbases vary from 97.4 to 101.8 mm, a range of 4.5%. In contrast the Specialized Tarmac goes from 970 mm to 1013 mm, a very similar range. Cannondale: 962 mm to 1012 mm. In all, wheelbases seem to vary by around 5% among bikes across t...

The Specialized Venge made its debut at Milan San Remo this year, and it couldn't have gone any better for the Morgan Hill company, as Matt Goss, a relative underdog, won the race. Move on the Tour de France, and with aerodynamically optimized mass-start road frames more popular than ever, Mark Cavendish has pulled out two impressive sprint victories on the bike in a first week notably unfavorable to sprinters. Last year when HTC was sponsored by Scott instead of Specialized, Cavendish rejected his Scott Foil (then F01) in favor of his tried-and-true super-beefed-up Addict, so once again this looks good for Specialized. Venge spotted at Mike's Bikes in San Francisco But the frame is only a relatively small part of the aerodynamic picture. Far more important is body position. So here's photos of Cavendish during his two victories this year... first stage 5: CyclingNews Then stage 7: CyclingNews These photos aren't cherry-picked: they're the first...