Body armor

Pretty cool strain-rate harneding "smart" polymer. Squishy to the touch, but hit it with a hammer and it's "tough as nails".

Sram ice cream maker

Not really, but that's what it looks like!

Pt innards

quarq pm battery replacement

Cervelo wind tunnel model

Performance. Commitment.

There's a handful of bike industry companies out there that take these words to heart. They invest in their ideas. They invest in the quantification of these ideas. They move past mere invention with this quantification step and deliver innovation. Sure, they might make some mistakes along the way, but the commitment piece will eventually overcome these missteps - that's how science and a dialed in process works.

Lots of companies get lazy and figure invention is good enough. Well, invention isn't "good enough" when a company takes performance and commitment seriously.

What's the difference between invention and innovation? Innovation is applied invention. A good idea with no applicability in the real world isn't worth much, eh?. Innovation is where it's at.

One way to think about how a company might conduct business on a day to day basis is to think of it as a three step process (lifted from "e-myth revisited"):

Innovation
Quantification
Orchestration

Really, the only way to know if your innovation is truly an innovation is to quantify it's effects on the system - in this case, does it make a bike racer go faster, feel better, more comfortable, whatever the goal was??? The last step is to pull it off in the marketplace, ya know, orchestrate/execute things so that the customer is ultimately satisfied.

Anyway, one company that continues to demonstrate that it is committed to performance (and always has an eye on emotion/feel/"design") is Castelli. As I was walking the floor at Eurobike, I saw my buddy from Castelli, Soren (and Steve too! -> those guys are awesome, they were going to ride their bikes back to Italy from Friedrichshafen after the show, which is pretty cool if you ask me!).

Soren gave me something that they were working on for this coming year and also shared a little story about David Millar and his high praise for their new skinsuits of last year (which they custom made/developed based on his feedback). Well, Castelli is working on coming out with a lightweight jersey this year - it's pretty sick, actually (and that's not "sick" as in "bad" that'd be "sick" as in "gen-x sick"...)

Well, from a caveman perspective, the easiest way to make a light jersey is to take a page out of Faris Al-Sutan's (Former Ironman World Champion) book and go with the MAN-BRA:

yeah, using half as much material will definitely get you a lighter jersey, but then, yeah you'd have to wear something that made you look like this:

So, the guys at Castelli, in their ultimate wisdom, made a jersey that had the same coverage as a regular jersey - you know, kind of like this:

I'm sponsored by Castelli, to some extent, as the team I raced for this year (Jamba Juice/TaylorMade Golf) got a killer deal thanks to my teammate Dave at Castelli Custom here in the USA:

So, comparing size mediums for both of these light and standard weight jerseys, my scale said that Castelli saved around 70 grams with their lightweight construction. The std one weighed 154 grams, the lightweight one weighed 84 grams. This lightweight jersey fit a bit tighter than the std one, as you can see in the side shots above - not as many poofy wrinkles - this jersey isn't for the faint of heart (your "curves" will show through the thin material).

This jersey makes sense - I dont' know about you, but I'd rather save 70 grams on my jersey than my stem.

In the shots above, I have a vest and my cell phone in the back pockets - you can see some different sag going on back there, eh? The light jersey definitely had some "bounce" to the back pockets...

I think this is a real good demonstration by a company of going after some low-hanging fruit in the performance department. No other clothing company is going after road jersey design from both a weight and aerodynamics perspective withe the fervor of Castelli.

Good on ya, Castelli, for demonstrating:

Performance. Commitment.

Water Bottles and Speed.

Lots of triathlon debate about which method of bottle storage is "faster". Downtube, seattube, behind the saddle, between the aero bars - everyone's got an opinion...

I had a 5 minute discussion on the phone the other day with a manufacturer about how I would test this in the tunnel to determine the "fastest" method of storing bottles. I didn't get invited to the test session, which is cool (I've got a job and all and can't make it to everything down there! :-) ) - so, it'll be interesting to see how that test came out in the end.

Anyway, over the years, lots of confusion has been wrought on the general public regarding this topic thanks to inexact tools, inexact methodologies, inexact context, and, perhaps even hubris among other possibilities.

Let me just make my position clear on this topic - if determining how to store your bottles is your #1 goal in life, give me a call. With the use of a wind tunnel and a well thought out test protocol, we'll get the answer for your specific setup. However, don't expect to answer this question with a five minute set of runs - it'll take awhile to get a better answer for you.

Here's a cool video that we did at lswt.com a year or so ago:

if that doesn't embed real well, check out this link (~1.4MB *.wmv file and right click/save as to view):

http://www.biketechreview.com/images/lswt_bottle_reach.wmv

Go ahead and post this video, or link to this blog entry wherever you like - it'll help spread the word about the website and where BTR tests in the tunnel, and that's a good thing as far as making sure we're still around in the future! ;-)

take it easy out there,

-kraig

Process

There's a school of thought that suggests that if one focuses effort on the "process", the results will come. I've heard this, or lines of thought like this, for quite awhile - I read/listen to (I subscribe to audible.com, which I totally love as it allows me to "read" books while commuting to/from work...) lots of different books that have peripherally addressed this topic, so I'm not sure where I picked it up in the past.

However, recently, I read a couple books that really drove this "focus process development" point home once again. The first book that I hammered through in a couple days is "the four hour work week" - I didn't take everything to heart in that book, but there is some good stuff in there. In one of the sections of that 4 hour work week book, the author refers readers to some other business books - I latched onto "the e-myth" - and read that one. There's a great section in there that talks about process development being the goal of running a successfull business. I think there are many different applications of the "process development" concept - be it work, life, relationships whatever...

The combination of these two books, along with some other things clunkin' around in the ol' melon have given me some more things to think about in my typical non-linear, conceptual based caveman brain.

Simply put, I'm an achievement oriented kind of person, who thinks that the goal is pretty much "learning" - life experience is the best kind of learning IMHO. I've got to tinker, refine, learn along the way. The journey from "novice" to "expert" in any of my pursuits is a fun one full of great satisfaction for me...

What the heck does this philosophical crap have to do with bikes? Well, a few years back, I started learning about testing cyclists in wind tunnels - I focused on process development from day one and the results have been coming ever since then - not just for myself and my learning, but for those that I've met along the way as well - it really is just a big long journey where most folks benefit from the experience.

Results? Two out of the top five on GC at the tour de france this year have spent time with BTR and lswt.com tweaking things. Now, today in the Vuelta - Samu just won the final TT and grabbed a spot on the final GC podium. More pics/discussion of the results of that Euskaltel tunnel test here.

I'm super proud of Samu, and the guys at Orbea who also seem to value the concept of focusing on the details of process development - and then reaping the rewards of that approach!

Back on the Grid

Hey everyone - I'm back on the grid.

Spent the past couple weeks kickin' around europe, including my first visit to friedrichshafen and eurobike.

Saw some neat stuff at eurobike and I'll be posting some pics on the main site within a few days.

Fwiw, being limited in our exposure to mass communication/media wasn't traumatic at all (of course the limits we placed on ourselves were voluntary - but still, a pretty refreshing experience).