If you're looking to ride your bike faster, then aerodynamic drag is typically the biggest thing holding you back. Upgrading to a dedicated aero road bike can come with a significant price tag, though. Fortunately, there are plenty of other bits of kit that don't cost the earth but can dramatically decrease your overall aerodynamic drag.
To find out what the bestvalue aero upgrades are, we enlisted the help of Stephen Roche of The Bike Tailor (an expert in bike fitting, aero testing and custom builds based in London and Brighton), and the Silverstone Sports Engineering Hub's wind tunnel. With Roche's help, our aero model Liam Cahill put a range of products (helmets, handlebars, wheels, tri-bars, speed suits and socks) and riding positions to the test to find out which offer the biggest aerodynamic gains for the least money spent.
When you ride a bike, a number of forces are acting against you, such as rolling resistance, drag and gravity. Though your power-to-weight ratio is a large determinant of performance on long, steep climbs, drag is the main problem almost everywhere else. You can pedal harder and increase your power output, but at some point that becomes unsustainable, even for the strongest riders. That's where your aerodynamic profile comes in as, while the focus of development tends to be on refining bikes and equipment, the rider accounts for 70-80% of the total aerodynamic drag in the riderplus-bike system.
Time, then, to reveal seven of the best-value aerodynamic upgrades that show huge watts savings aren't just for the elite...
Testing protocol
Where and how did we test?
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Esta historia es de la edición May 2023 de Cycling Plus UK.
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GANARY A COALMINE
The James Brown tune 'It's a Man's Man's Man's World' comes on the radio, filling the coach, and does nothing for my pre-event nerves as I sit surrounded by serious-looking, wiry, tanned men in Lycra. It's 6.30am, pitch black outside and I'm feeling very out of my depth as a relative newcomer to the world of clipless pedals and hurting for fun. Last night's stress dream involved being very unprepared to get married and being handed my great-grandmother-in-law-to-be's hideous silver dress with lace trim to wear minutes before the ceremony was due to start. I'll let you psychoanalyse that one.
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Air Apparent - Pollution hasn't gone away. It's still there in every lungful, even if we can't see it in the air or on the news. But there are reasons to breathe easier, thanks to pioneering projects using cycling 'citizen scientists'. Rob Ainsley took part in one...
The toxic effects of pollution have been known about for years. 'Just two things of which you must beware: Don't drink the water and don't breathe the air!' sang 1960s satirist Tom Lehrer.Over recent decades, though, pollution has dropped down our list of things to worry about, thanks to ominously capitalised concerns such as Climate Change, AI, Global Conflict, Species Collapse, etc. That doesn't, unfortunately, mean the problem has expired. Air quality often exceeds safe limits, with far-reaching and crippling effects on our health.
