Human-Powered Vehicle Speed Competition

nsasch writes "Over at Battle Mountain, NV on SR-305, for the 2008 Battle Mountain World Human Powered Speed Challenge (mirror), some of the best cyclists will be competing in human-powered vehicles to break speed records. The current world record was set in 2002 at the same location with a speed of 129.6 km/h (81 mph) by Sam Whittingham in a custom-made recumbent bike. A lot of advanced aerospace engineering goes into these machines to reach highway speeds on less than one horsepower. Take a look around their site for pictures of the event and this year's records. It ends 20 September, so more pictures and results will be coming."

Comments

Re:Not at sea level?

[Somegeek]

This is the longest, paved, straight, flat stretch of road that the organizers are aware of, in the US. Also, Nevada lets them shut it down for certain time windows for the race.

If you do the race on a banked racetrack you can get an advantage from the wind where you use the bike fairing as a sail. That wind assist is hard to calculate and factor out of the final time, while a small headwind or tailwind on a straight course is easily mathematically removed to be able to equalize the results.

Sam Whittingham's Bike Design

[catchblue22]

I didn't see it mentioned in the summary, but world speed record holder Sam Whittingham's bike was designed by a Bulgarian sculptor, Georgi Georgiev, who is not an engineer. The bike was not designed from computational fluid dynamics, or other modern engineering techniques. The design emerged from the brain of Mr. Georgiev; he designed the bike to "hide from the air", while providing Sam Whittingham with just enough space to pedal comfortably.

I have always been amazed that Sam Whittington and Georgi Georgiev have been able to consistently beat teams with engineers and batteries of computers with advanced aerodynamics software. Mr. Georgiev is something of a genius.