12-hour Technical Evaluation

Hello Folks,
I've been asked a lot of questions about the Silvios Maria rode to her amazing 12 hr. distance record. The "Yellow Bike" was one of the first Silvios built, and the only one shipped in a color other than black or white. Jim's black bike was also from the first production run.

This table will illustrate the differences in the setups for the two bikes:

The initial plan was to run the entire event with the Yellow Bike, and it received the most attention in preparation. The black bike was set up as the primary backup; my own Silvio (set up very much like Jim's with Campy parts) was set up as a third backup bike.

I've also been asked why the Yellow Bike "disappeared" after the fall that Maria took.

Maria's yellow bike struck the side of the support vehicle on the handoff, and went down very hard on the left side, sliding some distance.

The plan all along was to switch the bikes out if anything happened that required repair; there is simply too much time lost on an on-course repair. While Jim was checking Maria over, I was checking the yellow bike over. I had all of 2 minutes to assess the yellow bike, and it had sustained some damage to one of the brifters, and the rear carboyoke had taken a whack that I was unsure of the extent of. So I followed the plan, and switched the bikes out.

Weather reports were predicting a nasty storm with winds; this fortunately didn't materialize, but I would not have put her on wheel discs with 15-20mph crosswinds. Another bike switch would have eaten up time we would have had a hard time recovering. All of that meant the yellow bike became the spare bike for the black one; that's why I switched-out the disc wheels. Once the yellow bike went down, it was essentially done for the day, whatever my examination revealed, which was superficial damage.

The black bike was no slouch; I had taken specific steps to optimize it to the edge of its own performance envelope, given it was without wheelcovers and had a wider bar. In pre-race testing Maria thought that it actually felt faster than the yellow bike.

As these long races play out (I have been crew chief or mechanic for 5 automobile endurance races, from 6 to 12 hours) aerodynamics start to take a back seat to ergonomics. The yellow bike was aerodynamically optimized; the black bike was ergonomically optimized to the degree possible with the existing parts. If I had it all to do over (and I hope I do at some point!), I might actually schedule a bike change for mid-race. The wider bars and changes to hand positions seemed to make the black bike easier to ride after 6 hours on the Yellow Bike. At the time, I thought the wheelcovers had something to do with the crash, but during our post-race download discussion, it became clear that this was not the case.  The wheelcovers were very effective and valuable; combined with the narrowed bars and higher-pressure tires, our first cut at the data suggests that the Yellow Bike was about 5% faster than the Black bike.

An awful lot of this is "not about the bike". It's all about the rider, her comfort, confidence and condition. Remember, Cruzbikes are developed with "systems thinking", and that's also how we compete. Optimizing one part of the system (the bike) at the expense of another (the rider) is a recipe for failure.
 
Cruzbike has purchased a Power Tap power meter to support further Silvio optimization and to pre-tune the Vendetta. You can look forward to lots of interesting data and some modifications from the Cruzbike Speedshop you'll be able to try on your Silvio.

Stay Tuned!

Best,

Doug