Gain Without Pain

THE COST-FREE AERO TEST EVERY CYCLIST SHOULD TRY

Why toil away at hard intervals when you could make bigger gains by effortlessly tweaking your position? Tom Epton heads to Castle Combe in search of cost-free aero improvements

If someone told me they could add 10 watts to my threshold power in an afternoon, I’d bite their hand off. To add this much power through training alone would take at least a few solid interval sessions, if not several weeks of consistent hard work. But this is the promise of the simplest form of aerodynamic testing: a few pain-free test runs, a little positional rejig, et voila – a substantial dollop of extra speed.

One day, no training, 10W faster – an amount of power that equates to almost one minute in a 25-mile time trial at around 40kph (25mph). To many uninitiated riders, it sounds too good to be true. But it really does work: if you can improve your position on the bike to minimise your frontal profile – the bits of you pushing against the air – and improve the way that air passes over you, hey presto, you go faster. Much faster. Why slog away on the turbo, session after session, if you can simply tuck in your head and pull in your shoulders to make just as big an improvement to your race speed? OK, so it’s not quite that simple…