Dr. Michael Hutchinson — Cycling aerodynamics and the lifelong pursuit to go faster

0:00 Hi, and welcome to the Neil Ashton Podcast. In each episode, we explained some of the fascinating ways that science and engineering are changing the world around us. We talked to leading engineers from elite level sports like cycling and Formula One to some of the world's top academics to understand how fluid dynamics, machine learning, supercomputing are bringing in a new era of discovery. We also hear some of their life stories, their career advice, the lessons they've learned on the way that I hope will be helpful to you too. So sit back and enjoy this episode. Hi and welcome back to the The Ashton Podcast. So today's episode is all about

0:45 cycling and it's something that anybody knows. Me, I'm passionate about. I'm a keen cyclist. I'm one of these people who watches nearly all the races, not just the Tour de France, but the Classics, the other Grand Tours and basically any cycling race. I'm I'm kind of obsessed with it and that's partly because I just enjoy cycling, but also because I think there is a fantastic and super interesting link to aerodynamics. Aerodynamics for cycling is one of the key differentiators. And actually to model the flow over a bike is also extremely challenging for methods such as computational fluid dynamics, modelling the movement of the legs and the transition between

1:30 lamina and turbine flow. And that's why the person that I'm speaking into this episode, Doctor Michael Hutchinson or Doctor Hutch as some people know him, is one of the foremost experts on the practical application of improving aerodynamics or the aerodynamic efficiency of a cyclist, whether it's track cyclist or world tour cyclist. In this in this episode, we we talk about so many different things. I think he is a really unique character because he was a very top level cyclist himself. He holds numerous world records in terms of time trials. He did racing, he then moved on and, and continues to do. And I, I guess what a lot of people know him as is as a

2:18 journalist writing for Cycling Weekly. He does some commentary on, on Eurosport, he's written books, he acts as a coach. He was very involved with the British Cycling in some of the foremost years where that those marginal gains and the real sort of development of aerodynamics came in. And I think he is one of those pioneers who, as we, you know, discuss in the early days was doing things in wind tunnels, Even talks about having his own wind tunnel in his lounge. Really someone who wanted to tinker and really understood the importance of it, arguably well before it's commonplace today. One of the first people to have

2:58 power meters on his bike to sort of try and figure out where the game was coming from. Just so many things that I found fascinating and I also took the opportunity to speak to him at length about how things have changed. One of the common questions you know you get is around why are the cyclists today so much faster than the ones before? Is it to do with equipment? Is it to do with training? So we go through all those discussions about how trainings change nutrition, aerodynamics. I like I said, I this was a dream for me. It was talking about stuff that I found fascinating and hearing from one of the from the experts

3:39 was was great. So this is one definitely for cycling fans, but hopefully also for people just interested in aerodynamics, cycling CFD and just hearing from a fantastic person about his his life story in a way, even though, yeah, he's nowhere near complete. So yeah, sit back and enjoy this episode with Doctor Hutch. How did you get in to cycling? What age were you, cyclist? I was 22 or 23. I'd been a rower, hadn't at all. And I, I started, I rode for, I rode for Cambridge Lightweights. And then I stopped doing that because I started doing a doctorate and I just didn't have

4:28 the time to hang about the boathouse while 8 undergraduates got their lives together. And I took up cycling as a kind of, I kind of a means to not get fat really. I just was looking for a sport that I could do. And I tried running and I wasn't amazing at running. And my no partner's father was a cyclist. And he said, yeah, borrow a bike, go for a ride, see how you like it. And I liked it. And that's Scott, how I got it was also I liked. It was also immediately obvious that I was good at it, you know, So you can tell. I just tell I got kind of 5 minutes into my first bike ride and thought, actually, yeah, I can kind of do this. It just felt right.

5:08 So that's that, that's how I came into it. And that's why I ended up having a slightly funny cycling career, because I started 10 years too late. Yeah, so that's. So that is quite late, isn't it? I mean, you know, a lot of people now are like 8 years old, Yeah, on a bike or something. But you have the card I mean. 13 or 13 or 14 or something. 13 or 14 or something. It would be a good time to take up cycling because you're kind of you're old enough to plenty of people take it up younger, but if you took it up by 13 or 14, you wouldn't be losing out very much. If you take it up when you're in in your 20s, you are you're going to be running to catch up.

5:40 Some. Some people do it. Yeah, and how, how did you then? What made you want to go? I mean, there's a keen amateur cyclist which you get, but but you went further than that, right? So what were you always a competitive? Person. To do that. Yeah, well, it's, yes, it's partly that. It's also the kind of the feeling you find something you're good at. How good can I be? Because I was a reasonable rower, but I was obviously not rowing internationally. I kind of university level rowing was clearly my limo and I found something I thought I could probably be better at and I could do it on my own. So I wasn't dependent on anybody else.

6:22 So I kind of just chased that and got faster over two or three seasons. And then in 1999, which feels a long time ago, I was second in the national 10 mile championships. I won the season long circuit series. All of it was a little bit of a surprise. I'd, you know, I'd had a good winter, I'd trained well and suddenly that year I was I was flying. I was maybe my third season. And yeah, I hadn't necessarily been the plan. I hadn't started out when I took up cycling thinking I am going to win this, this, this, this and this. I just sort of followed what I thought would work. I did actually. I mean, I started being interested in the aerodynamics of it back right back then

7:05 because it seemed to me, well, you kept reading that 80% of the drag was, was, was from the from his aerodynamics. You think, well, why is everyone else ignoring this? Do we not believe this? And I did, I did a four up race, a university 4 up race with amongst other people, an engineer who sat down and did some really basic modelling with, I mean literally a piece of a piece of paper and a calculator and said, right, the optimum way to ride this is for Michael to sit on the front for 50 KS and we'll sit behind him because he just, he just modelled it backwards from the differences between our, our, our personal best times and we

7:43 all went well. That doesn't make any sense. And we went and did the race and it was blindingly obvious afterwards that he was absolutely right. The fastest way the four of us would have got round the course of the bit if I just sat in the front of the three of them and sat behind me because I was quite a lot quicker than them. And that just made me think, OK, so if you look at the kind of the physics of cycling that people talk about, actually this, this, you know, if you follow that, you get some more. So that's kind of, it's both how I took up cycling and I mean, almost immediately became a little bit interested in this

8:10 side of things. Then I finished my doctorate. I was working in an academic job that was a one year contract. And that came to an end and I started looking for a job for the following year. And at a roundabout that point somebody rang me one day and said would you like to come and ride for my team? We'll give you some, they'll give you some bikes. As if there was a few 1000 lbs of money involved in it. I mean, it was about the same amount of money as that I've been getting from the academic contract. So it wasn't nothing. And I thought, yeah, let's go and do that. Let's take a year and see. A part of it was honestly, I

8:46 just like the novelty of becoming a, a middle-aged, slightly overweight, middle-aged professor of international law and having undergraduates go, hey, Professor Hutchinson, he won a cycling chat. And the other one's like, no, no, he couldn't possibly. I just kind of like, I like the idea of this being a kind of slightly funny piece of back story that was kind of, it's not a great reason to become a professional cyclist, but it's more or less where I came at it from. And So what team what? Tell us more about what? What was that? What was that like? I'm writing for a team that was essentially I was a one man team, but I had a team manager

9:22 who ran a specialist, a specialist to the time trial equipment shop on on. Well, I could have said an online shop. I think at this point it was probably literally a mail order shop. I think you phoned him and told him what he wanted. It was like the dark ages and he he done a deal with Giant with Giant because Giant at that point were making it where they were making the Mike Burrows concept of the compact bike where instead of having bespoke frames, you had three basic sizes, a whole pile of different seat pins and stems. And Mike Burrows idea was that anyone could fit anyone from sort of five foot nothing to six foot five could fit on one of

9:59 these three basic sizes using the right bets. And Andy, who was running the team looked at this and looked looked at this concept and said, well, that might be true and it might not, but I'll tell you what, any one of these things can be turned into a time travel bike because you can get, you know, but suddenly all of the lengths and heights were sort of independent of each other. So you weren't dealing with having to build a special bike that was a little bit shorter, a little bit lower. You could actually do the specialist geometry by using all the bits that might had had designed to make it fit anyone. And he went to giant with this

10:34 and they and they said, well, if you're right, we're going to be able to sell these in vast quantities to time trialists. And he said, well, let me, let me go and recruit you a time trialist. You will prove this point. And he recruited, he recruited me and they said my job, you know, my job was to get my picture in the cycling press or by whatever means necessary. It was sort of proto proto social media. That was the almost the main objective. The easy way to do it was to win a lot. So that's how I did it. OK, so this and things have moved on. I guess at that time that whole aerodynamics, I mean compared to now where, you know, it is a massive differentiator.

11:12 Everybody, even an amateur cyclist is a sort of aero, you know, obsessed person. I guess then it was very different. Was it almost the opposite when people didn't believe in it and you were a slight outlier on that side? Yeah, they believed and they didn't. Everyone kind of, it was perfectly clear that Tri bars were faster than not using Tri bars because IQ Tri bars came in in the late 90s. So everyone which was sorry, the late 80s. So it was a long time before I arrived. But it'd been completely clear from that that you went significantly faster if you used aero bars than if you just kind of grip, grip the cow horns in the old in the old style.

11:50 So it wouldn't be quite right to say that people didn't believe in it. I think there was a scepticism about the subtleties of it. I think if you got on The Time Machine now and went back and said, well, the difference between this pointy helmet and this pointy helmet is 2 seconds a mile, I think you'd have encountered some skepticism about that. I think people would have gone the best as to a pointy helmet. Skin suit should have been the other big one because, you know, you made it out of like her, you made it reasonably tight. That's it. A skin suit was a skin suit. So people believe in aerodynamics. They just didn't believe in the

12:22 small differences, and I kind of did because I couldn't see why. If putting a pair of Tri bars on your bike would be to make you 2, two minutes faster over 25 miles, surely there were other things you could do that would make you 30 seconds faster over 25 miles. So yeah, I started an awful lot of very misguided homebro error research, but along the way I I stumbled in, I stumbled into something, and I can't emphasize how much more that was luck in the judgement. But is this something, you know, you're, you know, having done things like the 12 hour record 100 miles, To me as a amateur cyclist, this sounds just horrendously painful.

13:05 Is there a do you enjoy putting yourself through that sort? Is there something about those longer distance that appealed to you? No, not at that point. I I hated 12 hours. I did 12 hours because I was under degree of sponsor pressure to do them. I might have done, I might have done the first one anyway, out of curiosity. I wouldn't have done the second or third that I did in that era. But yeah, interesting about something like a 12 hour is it's a competition between your aerodynamics and your digestion. You you as a bike rider are, you know, the actual you're if you're aerobically good, you yeah, you've got an advantage. But the big challenge is

13:41 actually keeping itching and and keeping Arrow. And I did, I've done some 24 hour racing in the last couple of seasons as a sort of a sort of retirement project. And it's again, it's the same thing. It's about it's about eating and about aerodynamics. And how? So I would say I don't particularly enjoy putting myself through things. It's it's I'm much rather right A10 than a 12A10 mile time trial than a 12 hour, believe me. OK. OK. So it was more, I thought, do you have some sort of, I don't know, thing that makes you just love the, the, the torch of going through long distances? No, no, not to me. I, I would always, I kind of

14:21 liked the races less if the distances went up. I liked, I like the kind of the short races better because I I enjoyed the kind of focus of that and the high powers and this the kind of the speed and how all of that balanced quite critically. I like that much better than the the adventure of going off and trying to do a 12 hour. It's to be honest, 100 mile time trial isn't very different from from a 10 mile time trial because particularly if you're doing it in sort of three hours, 3 hours, 20 or something, it's not particularly long ride because you're going quite quickly. You cover a certain amount of distance, but there's plenty of people who go and ride for kind

14:58 of ride hard for kind of three, 3 1/2 hours. That's it's not that it's not that hard. It's a little bit hard. I. Was going to say. It's not kind of a long distance torture. I guess it's more the being in the position that I well, I guess it depends on your flexibility, doesn't it? And like how used to you are in that position? And how how you trained in the position, because it's one of the changes I made fairly early on was thinking if if I if I race in a time trial position, why am I spending my winter riding around in a road bike? So I built the world's first winter winter low pro, a low pro with mud guards on up from about probably 2000 and four, 2005

15:35 before I came up with that one. But yeah, I had I had a mud guard low pro for for winter training. And what did people think about that? If they saw you on the road, did they take a double look? I don't think anyone ever really commented on. I mean, I didn't take it on club runs or anything, so I'm not sure how many people really kind of stopped and went hang on a second. Those things don't go together. I did a race on it once because my, my, my years, my bike for that year is an early season race and my year bike for that year hadn't come through yet and it was muddy and I thought, I've stuffed what I'll risk. I'll I'll do this race with mud

16:05 guards. But that's. Never actually put them in the wind tunnel. Maybe they're, you know, maybe they're a fairing, I don't know. This is what you're going to see now in the next track, mud guards. So what, what was how did things then progress from there? So you you sort of gone out doing the PhD gone into, I guess that you said, why not? Let's let's try and do something exciting, maybe talk what what was the life after that like? Or how did things progress? Well, the idea had been to do a year, a couple of years and two or three years in I was still winning a lot and reckon I could win a lot more. So I plugged away at it.

16:43 I had quite a nice deal in terms of royalties on bikes and things like that. So I was making a reasonable amount of money and I thought, well, oh, I could go back to being a legal academic. I think I'm happy here actually. So I just, I kept kept going, did things like the commonwealth's managed not to get selected for the world's until I'd more or less retired. But I just found I kept making progress. I kept finding new ways to go faster. I kept meeting new people who could help me go faster. I did the R record in 2003, which I didn't. I didn't break the world R record, but I learnt a huge amount about particularly

17:24 aerodynamics in the course of doing that and aerodynamic testing. And I always felt that every year I was working through, I was getting a little bit better. I was finding new ways to do this. I kept think kind of stones I wanted to turn over to see what would happen if, and somewhere around about 2005 or 2006. I just think actually probably a little difficult to just walk straight back into an academic job now because they're going to want to know where I've been for the past seven years. And I'm not sure telling them I was doing the Commonwealth Games. It's really going to be a big selling point if you kind of arrive at the Cambridge

17:55 University law faculty looking for employment. So at that point I thought, well, I might as well ride this to the bottom. So I kept, I kept going. I wrote, I've already started writing books and things like that. That sort of had to be in a different direction because I I sort of became a cycling media guy. I started writing magazine columns and writing books and things like that. So that that was a change as well. I was. Going to ask about that. Was that something that you'd always like doing? Did you ever do stuff with student newspapers or did you ever have sort of journalism media thing before? No, not really. I I did some sort of freelance

18:35 writing in the winters in the early, early season in the kind of 2000 and one 2002, mainly because I get a long way from cycling. There was a friend of my girlfriend's who was editing a book or a travel guide to Ireland and there was a section of Belfast, which is my native city. And she said could you read this? Because some of this doesn't feel quite right to me. And I read it and said it's not really right. No, She said could you rewrite it? And I said yes. So I wrote quite a lot of a travel guide to Ireland and I did quite a good job of that. So I spent kind of a couple of winters actually writing and editing travel guides.

19:13 So I had a little bit of experience of that world. And then when I did the R record somewhere a week or two after that, I thought, you know, that's, that's quite a good story because there's, there's my R record attempt, which was a little bit chaotic. In the end, it's like all these things, you start off with the best of intentions and it ends up being, you know, slapstick and there's a whole history of the R record and there wasn't an English language book about the R record. So I, I said, you know, I wrote a proposal and sent as a few literary agents. It helps that my, my, my girlfriend is a, a publisher. So I sort of, I knew, I knew the world of, of what you tried to

19:51 do. And yes, somebody, somebody bought that as a book. So I then spent a year writing my first book, which did reasonably well. And say that's, that took me. No, but no, it wasn't. And it certainly wasn't the case that I kind of did the R record so I could write a book, the R record and one or two of the reviews, I sort of said, oh, there's this joker who's had to go with the R record just so we can write a book about it. I'm not well, that's really how it worked. I'm not a terrible bike rider. And then I did another couple of books after that for magazines and things. And that was kind of the direction I went in for maybe 3

20:26 or 4 years before starting to kind of get a bit more interested back into some of the technical sides of cycling. And, and I think actually, you know, your columns bring this sort of funny side. I remember reading something about like bike ownership recently. You know, so many of the things relate, like cycling is one of those it is very well known and equally not. You know, it's, it's sort of got a weird relationship, isn't it? And to some people it's, it's like a really hot topic. But it's not from what I understand. And I don't know. But you know, in Belgium and in Holland, it really is like a national support where the UK,

21:08 it feels like it's like a subculture almost. You know, some of my friends were on WhatsApp all the time talking where other people have no clue other than the Tour de France. It's yeah, everybody knows what it is because more or less everybody can ride a bike. So there's a familiarity to it. Everybody knows what it looks like. It's one of those sort of slightly second tier as a sport. It's one of those slightly second tier sports like Wimbledon, like like tennis, which comes up every year. When Wimbledon is on, everyone's a tennis fan for two weeks. There are a lot of people who, when the Tour de France is on become something of a cycling

21:41 fan. More so maybe a decade ago. It was, there was such a, a high watermark after London 2012. Then the, the Tour de France was in Yorkshire, the Jared Italia was in Ireland. It really was massive at that point. Everyone was a cyclist. And now we've got to the point where most people can remember that. So actually they know what they knew then. They're still a little bit interested and they kind of, but they pick it up and set it down a bit as a, that sort of as a, as a sport, as a pastime, a little bit the same probably. I think we have people who took up cycling through the, the 20 tens, 20, fourteens when it, it

22:16 seemed to be everywhere and a lot of them are still there and still around. But it it, it hasn't become, it's not like football or there's probably only space in any country for one or two really sort of dominant sports that everyone is interested in. In Belgium, cycling is the sport. In the UK, it's, it's football and it always has been. So you're always kind of scuffing around looking for whatever else you can find. Yeah. Before maybe talking about some of the other media things, I was interested, you know, you said you started to get more into the technical side. So after the hour record. So how when did you start to or

23:01 could you describe the link then because that was sort of a bit earlier, but just as British Cycling was, was really trying to get into more the aerodynamics and the marginal gains. How was your sort of relationship and over that with some of that timing? Yeah, I mean, I like I say, I kind of had some home real, real home brew stuff. I built a wind tunnel on my sitting room, which didn't really work. I said. I was trying to say I built a wind tunnel in my sitting room and then I had it didn't really work because if anybody thinks it might have done, but I mean, it produced results that made sense. But you know, it was basically making little models of myself

23:41 and I'd kind of created a balance of that, but it didn't make a lot of, but it was interesting. You could actually see that off the kind of little poseable model. You could see actual repeatable differences from quite small changes. So that was a little bit interesting. The the big thing that I really started to do when I was getting ready for the our record, actually, I kind of think that biggest there was the other thing. The other thing I used to do was just your frontal area analysis. My finest star there was realizing that if you took a photograph of yourself head on and then took another photograph of yourself head on in a different position.

24:16 Printed both the photographs out onto a nice heavy sheet of photographic paper and got a scalpel and cut away everything that wasn't you or your bike and just weighed the paper. You actually had quite a wow. I probably at that point you could just about you could probably just about have done it in a in a photo processing software with a pixel count. He's maybe a got on the early side for that. If you knew what you were doing, you could have done that. I did it a really kind of analogue way. So there were things like that. But the first real point that I started getting actual proper quantitative results was using a

24:52 set of power cranks in an era when power meters were unusual. Just going and doing track testing with a set of power cranks. And you did. 12 or 16? Lap run and you just looked at speed against par. And I'd got a really kind of basic, really basic spreadsheet model that would just correct for, you know, correct power for speed so that you could correct everything to 50 kilometers an hour and it would just give you your power for 50 kilometers an hour. And it, it clearly it wasn't dealing with any of the vertical forces and there was a certain amount of noise in the system and you couldn't find your Watt one at a time, but you could certainly if there was a 10 or a

25:34 15 Watt difference between things, you could, you could see it and it was repeatable. It was laborious and it wasn't cheap. But one of the pluses I had was that at that point my sponsors were paying for my track time. So I could book the track in Manchester and have it to myself for three or four hours at a time. And I would go up and do 12 lap run, 16 lap run, come back down, download it, take, take a take kind of a nice section in the middle of it somewhere that was just nice. And even I very quickly learned that if you were on a rising or a falling power trend, you were in all sorts of trouble because that just because the your speed lags behind your your power.

26:16 So if the power curve wasn't flat, but you could almost always kind of deal with it by making sure the section you were taking started and finished on the same par like usually dealt with it. If you were getting faster the whole way through the run, it was junk. But if you have someone on trackside who's giving you kind of your splits as you go after a couple of laps, you settled in it. It took a bit of experience. You certainly you couldn't have done it as a consumer experience. You couldn't just have brought on a stranger and said, yeah, come and do this. We'll we'll do your aerodynamic. It it took a lot of skill and

26:45 practice to make it work, but it, it produced good repeatable results that that then could have would validate in the real world. And it the, the other really basic thing that was interesting about that was if you did something like 5 laps of the track with your elbows in a natural position and then you tucked your elbows right in and you watch the trackside coach a lap after you started doing that, they would have taken several steps away from the start finish line, which would indicate that you had just started going faster. And it had an immediacy that you wouldn't ever see in the real world by doing that and looking

27:22 at a, a bike computer because you were maybe only gaining .3 or .4 of a kilometer an hour. But when you do it on a controlled environment like a track and you're getting that kind of lap by lap feedback, you can immediately see the difference it's making. So it, it kind of firstly had the effect of really making me realize how very small changes could produce very significant results and, you know, the beginnings of actually trying to quantify these things. And it seems like that's actually a good point about the power meters. So when you know, again, they're so commonplace now, so in there, when did you start seeing them

27:57 more commonly used then? Would it be in the early 2000s? Or so 2/2/2000 I was involved with the GB squad in 2000 and I used one on the track there. And then 2001 I bought 1 because I had a lottery grant and I rode from the rode race from Northern Ireland. The lottery grant system there was you they, they, you couldn't have like a living grant. They would just buy you equipment. And the thing I asked them to buy me in 2001 was an SRM power meter, which I think in 2001 cost something like 2 1/2 thousand pounds. Yeah, I was. It was an expensive, it was an expensive thing and it didn't work brilliantly. I ended up with two of them

28:43 because essentially you needed one to use and one on its way to repair. Repair or on its way back from being repaired. But it was it was it was such a powerful tool. And I was still riding, doing stuff with British Cycling and they were very keen that I have because that even in 2000 that everything they were doing had started to hang off par as the, you know, their core metric. That was Simon Jones and that era was the head track coach and he was a very numbers and a very numbers driven coach. So, yeah, the 2000, but at that point, people would come up to you at a race and point at this thing on your bike and say,

29:18 what's that? And you'd say it's a party, Here they go, what's one of those? And you would explain the concept. And a lot of them, some, some people went, oh, it's brilliant. A lot of people just went but but why don't you just see how fast you go? And you would try to explain why this was a more useful number. But yeah, and I would say that was at least a decade before they became really commonplace. And they'd been, I mean, they'd been kind of prototyped something wrong for a few years before that. But that was, that was pretty much the beginning. I I think I was kind of in on the ground floor on that one. And did you, you know in terms

29:54 of your training, I guess before you were training on feel or heart rate, did you, did you notice a performance difference? Heart rate. Transitioning to power meters as well. And to be honest, not a huge difference. It meant what you were doing is much more controlled. You've got kind of real confidence in it. It probably it isolated kind of training zones a little bit better. And particularly for kind of lower effort training zones, you could judge those more accurately because if you're trying to get like a Zone 2 off a heart rate monitor, heartbeat monitors are, yeah, they'll tell you how hard you're working, but

30:35 they'll also tell you how warm you are, how dehydrated you are, how stressed you are, what your blood volume is. They'll tell you all sorts of other things that will come into that. And you know, if you use a power meter now, you notice there's quite a lot of heart rate drift even across the length of a session. So it made that more accurate. It I probably got a bit fat. I probably did. My performance improved around that era because I probably up to that point overtrained a bit if you go back to the 1990s. And that wasn't really what we were coming out the far side of that. But the training volumes people did was insane.

31:13 I was, I'm doing, I'm writing another book at the minute, which includes some training stuff. And one of the things I was looking at was kind of like some historical training things. And I found a recommended, recommended by a coach training program for doing a 24 hour time trial that suggested, assuming it is assuming you had a full time job, but it was suggesting that you could fit in a couple of hours before work and probably another 3 or 4 after work. And you did that five days a week. So what's that adds up to five hours, 15, that's 25 hours a week. Then it suggested some long rides at the weekend instead of

31:51 saying you could do six hours on Saturday and six hours on Sunday. So it's racking you up to kind of 3839 hours a week. I said you should start doing that in October and do it till the beginning of the season. And, you know, I, I think this is being presented as sort of a serious training program for someone who really wanted to go places, but nobody in the world does that anymore. And you were probably doing it harder than zone 2 as well because you were probably just going out to ride it kind of as hard as you could. So I in, I had a great season in 2000 and one 2000 and sorry, 2000 I had a great season. 2001 wasn't as good because I, I thought, well, I'm good at this.

32:30 I'll train harder. And I realized part way through 2001 that actually I was just knackered the whole time. It was, there's a guy like a man called Pete Keen who was the first performance director of kind of the British Cycling organization as you would now recognize it. And I met him for the first time in in Manchester around about that era. And he said, you're the most exhausted looking cyclist I've ever seen. You need to train less. And he did that literally. I met him in a corridor and he stopped me and said you're Michael Hutchinson, I know you. You need to train less. Wow. And he seems to have been right. So that was right. It's confounding variable

33:12 because that's around about the point where I got my first power meter. And of course, I trained probably dropped my training mileage and my training volume by probably a third between 2001 and 2002. So who's to say the power meter helped do that because it gave you the confidence you could see, you could see that the numbers were going in the right direction. You could quantify that and you could you could see that on your own all winter. You, you because before that you would train all winter and your first race of the year would be terrified because you just wouldn't know. So you turn up to some dumb race in February and right till you

33:47 could taste blood in your mouth. So just prove that you could still do it. As soon as you've got a power meter on the bike, you get to February and go. Well, last February I won a race on 430 watts. This February I can clearly do the same thing. So unless everybody else in the world has got 10% better, I'm going to be just fine. So it gave you that degree of confidence to to to have faith in the training you were doing. So yeah, it it was quite important from that point of view. The thing is, that's what everyone does. Now. The idea of that being novel is seems kind of absurd. Well, that, that's kind of maybe one of the central question to

34:21 look to dive a bit deeper with you is why if you look at italic pagatcha or these, you know, the current leading top riders and then you contrast it back into the 90s or the early 2000s. What is it that is making them beat all the records and then smash away with it? Is it the bikes? Is it the training? Is it nutrition? Like how have you, how do you analyse the progression and the influence of each of those factors in how they're going so much faster now? I I think nutrition's a lot of them. If you go back even 10 years,

35:09 the sort of standard target was 70 or 80 grams of carbohydrate an hour. And if you, if you've got a six hour, if you've got Milan Saidorama, 6-7 hours, all of Milan Saidorama really is in that last hour. So you've got to survive that first five hours. And you can kind of the more you can eat, the more you've got left at the end. If you can eat 80 grams of carbohydrate an hour, well, that's OK. If you could eat 100 grams of carbohydrate an hour over five hours, well, that's another 100 grams of carbohydrate. That's, that's like another half hours high level riding in terms of energy that you've you've stashed away.

35:47 And most of the, the decent, most decent pros these days can do 120 a 130, maybe 150 grams of carbohydrate in an hour. So they're getting on towards doubling what we used to do. And that that's made a huge difference. And that's largely based on improved sports nutrition technology because there are, for example, there are there are different, different sorts of carbohydrate have different transport across the gut membrane. So fructose goes a different way to glucose. So the first thing that somebody realized was that if fructose and glucose aren't absorbed the same way, well, you can combine them into one sports drink. So suddenly, instead of 80 grams

36:27 of carbohydrate an hour, you can do 100 just because you take your standard 80 grams an hour, you put 20 grams of fructose in it, you give it a shake. This is literally, we used to buy fructose from the supermarket, like from the jam making department put it in. I mean, it was the sweetest thing known to man and it was probably been quite hard to sustain for a very long time. But suddenly you could do another 20 grams of carb, you could do another 20 grams of carbide. And it's we've moved that on again into kind of different delivery systems. So that makes a difference. That also helps with your training, that helps in racing, but it supports better training

37:05 and that that helps that. I think training has got more specific because we can measure it better. You can, you know, it's much more straightforward to go to a lab and get good results and then go and do kind of lab type testing in the field so that that that Physiology to work with teams can actually monitor what's going on and what progress they're making without having really to go to a laboratory anymore. So to that extent, training has improved like a lot of things, a lot. Sometimes people say, what do I think's made the biggest difference of cycling in the last 20 years? And I say the ability to measure stuff because it's so much

37:41 there's so much less guesswork involved. And a lot of the time it's not something that a physiologist or an arid analysis from the year from 1999 wouldn't have understood. It's just that a, a physiologist or a nutritionist or a, or an arid analysis from 25 years ago wouldn't have been able to measure except under very specific lab conditions. All of the, all of these things make, make make a difference. And there's, there is also, there's a psychological aspect in that the expectations people have of themselves feed into the, the relationship between psychology and Physiology is not one or two separate things. There's an extent to which the, you know, there's a central

38:24 nervous system input to your physical capacity. So that now that's an area that there's a lot of interesting stuff going on now that I must admit I don't absolutely understand, but so there's some very good work in that. So the reason they're going, there are a lot of reasons they're going faster. The first one I would point out would be nutrition. And do you think so if if you say nutrition and I'd agree with you and that's sort of interesting link to what you were saying before is like, can you stomach it? You know, if you're doing like a 7 hour or I guess a Grand Tour every day? Have you got bowel issues? Are you able to sort of

39:02 continually do it? I guess you have to be physiologically not have issues with digestion or, you know, irritable bowel syndrome or something that just rules you out from from that. But what about the training? Do you think that maybe it's more as A and non professional? I sometimes almost get a bit confused by the different advice, you know, that you see on various websites or you know YouTube channels. Do you think the teams and the riders all pretty much train the same and they know? Or do you think there is still a lot of variation and uncertainty on the balance of zone 2, zone 4, zone 5? I, I think, I think you can get where you're going a lot of

39:50 different ways in training. I don't think there's a single right way to train. I think you could train the same athlete two different ways and get the same result. The things you do certainly do need to be aware of our overall load because overtraining's a, a, a proper problem. Again, it's easier to measure now. It's, it's hopefully easier to avoid those problems. I mean, I kind of. I interviewed within the space of two weeks a few years ago. I interviewed two different coaches from the same elite team, and one of them said it's just about load. Just, you know, you give the rider the load they need. It doesn't matter if it's zone

40:28 2, zone 3, zone 4, sprints, whatever. Give them the load they need, adapt it by what they like and what they'll do and what they're good at, and you're fine. And a week later I interviewed another coach, slightly more senior coach, but from the same team. And I did the thing that you do when you want to look like an expert, which is you quote what the last expert you talked to said to you, and you quote that as an expert. And I sat back expertly in my chair and said, well, of course it's all about load. Yeah. And he could. No, no, no, no, no, no. It's really specific. You have to you. And he he started into explaining to me how you have to

41:05 find the right gradient of Rd. at the right altitude to simulate the exact effort for so you work out where the attack on up do is going to be and you find a road that's that gradient at the right altitude. And you rehearse that. It was completely different, I think. But, but, but you guys are literally training the same bike riders. And that, that really interested me. I think specificity helps. I think it also helps with, with with motivation and it helps give athletes a lot of confidence. And this is where it's athletes are very complicated things and and training an athlete is thereby is a complicated thing. I mean, athletes that I've coached, I tend to work

41:45 backwards from the demands of the event. With World Tour riders, it gets a little bit more complicated and you maybe are in the position where they've got a target event, but they're actually going to spend a lot of their time doing something else that they need to do to keep their place in the team, to keep actually being that World Tour bike rider and living in that environment. So you do often at that level, you have a lot of compromises, but it still does basically revolve around the specificity of of the event. And as I say, the fact that you can measure people's progress better, but I don't feel like training has changed a huge amount in the last 10 or 15

42:26 years. People talk about, oh, we're in modern training and I think coaching has got better. Athletes have got better at providing feedback, We've got better at measuring it, but it's, it's been a fairly marginal gain. It, it hasn't been the same scale as some of the aerodynamic gain, some of the nutritional gains. I think, you know, you probably publish this podcast and I get furious emails from coaching friends of mine saying, no, we've changed this, we've changed that. But in the end of the day, it's, it's not like, you know, obviously there's a doping issue in the past and cycling a little bit of the current probably.

43:00 But that's another topic which makes it quite hard to look over time at things like records, power to wet performances and so on. Because you go back to a point where those rescued by doping. But it's not as if in the last 10 years, amateur athletes with decent coaching have started doing 6 watts per kilo when they were doing 5. You know, maybe athletes who were doing 5.5 point, 5 watts per kilo, better coaching, slightly more refined approach to it, they get into 55.2 watts per kilo. It, it, it's not night and day, it's an improvement. And if you're at a race, well, yeah, it's it's going to be a decisive difference. But it's not as if people are

43:39 suddenly finding 75 watts where their dad couldn't have found them before. Yeah. And I kind of wonder as well of the salary side of things, the professionalism that, you know, if you're being paid millions now compared to I guess what was 10s or hundreds of thousands, whether the, the professionalism, you know, you see that in other like football where they'd say, oh, we'd go for a drink, you know, after the game or something. And now you would never do that, you know, Did did you see that as well, that the level of professionalism has just the the other stuff outside of cycling almost? Maybe, maybe I, my feeling is that most of the riders I've

44:28 known or worked with have been, they've been pretty professional. I think probably more professional than a lot of other sports. The ones who've been good at it and done well. I've certainly, I've been very in my kind of capacity in my later years as a career. My, my later part of my career. I would go to kind of international events as sort of someone who was kind of approaching 40 and you know, riding in a team with, with riders who were 2122, maybe even a little younger than that. And I was always really impressed by, you know, they did their strength and conditioning, they did their stretches, they went to bed early.

45:06 They took nutrition seriously. You know, I think things, things like that. I've I've often been impressed with riders who've done well team to pick that stuff up quite early on. And I'm not sure that it's got vastly more professional and I don't think the attitudes share among the top riders. I think they always rode like that. I, I, I suppose it's possible that if you come down a bit further to a kind of a slightly more mediocre level, there's a higher degree of professionalism because people it's, it's that much more straightforward things like social media. It's that much more straightforward to see how people, how the good riders

45:42 live, how they do it. You can kind of, you can go, you can follow, you can follow sort of top world tour pro and Strava. And so to see that, yeah, in the offseason, yeah, they're reckon they're not really riding their bike, but you know what, they're still getting out. They're doing some nice easy rides. They don't take that long off. They ease themselves back into it because there's all these things that you kind of know you're supposed to do. But it's very educational to see someone who's really good actually going out and and doing them. It's why in a team like the, the British track team, there are always, at any point where I was

46:14 involved in it, there were always one or two kind of tentpole athletes who the other athletes looked up to. Chris Hoy, probably the the clear, probably the clearest example of that, because he took it seriously. He approached it like a like a, like a job. He did the things the strength and conditioning coaches wanted him to do. And people would look at that and go, OK, well, that's this, you know, that's how Chris does it. And Chris has I don't know how many Olympic gold medals. Well, you know, that's, that's how I'll do it. There is a there is a leading by example. If if you can see it, it's much easier to to follow up. Yeah, maybe you're right.

46:49 Then maybe I should say the professionalism of the top riders maybe hasn't changed, but it's maybe the more of the, the everybody is being more professional. So it's sort of like the domestics maybe are sort of rising up because everybody's more, but so training how large they sort of stayed there is improvements, but you're saying it's not a massive a nutrition. For sure. I think, I think what we have with training is, I think what we have with training is a better version of fundamentally the same thing. I don't think anything enormous has changed. And I think, you know, we're, we're better at suiting the athlete to the, to the, the

47:27 training to the athlete and getting the athlete to do the right training. But fundamentally, yeah, yeah. And, and I guess the, as you said, the, the data-driven decisions, the fact that trading peaks and all this sort of stuff is you can see stuff where I guess before maybe as you say, they, they knew what they needed to do, but they didn't have the ability to track it or analyse it to to the same extent. And maybe I should count about some of this that mainly have been talking about men's cycling, but there's been a huge transformation also women's cycling. Did you see, how have you seen that change? Is it, is it similar to the men in terms of just nutrition

48:10 training? Or do you think there's bigger differences on the the women's side than the the men's side? I, I think, I think that the, the increasing opportunities for, for, for, for women in Pro Cycling means that there's an opportunity to get it right. I think they all, I think the women's peloton have always known how to do it, but very often, even at relatively high levels, you've got athletes who are also working as coaches or having to kind of balance things. And I think that's been that's been the big change is actually, you know, we're we're getting on towards proper sized contracts for a lot of the women's peloton. And if you went back 10 or 12

48:52 years, the top riders were, you know, they weren't getting the same contracts as the guys, but they were at least able to ride As for the proper full time pros. But that's been extended further down the peloton. So I wouldn't say they're more professional in the sense that there's been an improvement in, you know, compliance to to training programs and so on. I think there's been an improvement in people's ability to actually take on, you know, the kind of training program that that helps them get to their, it helps them get to their, to their, to their best. I think that's been a change, yes. I don't think it's been a change of attitude.

49:28 It's literally been a change of the business model. Yeah, I I guess you're right. As soon as people can have a full time job, I guess you can do more training. You don't have to skip. The, it's, it's, it's a version of, you know, if you go back to what happened in cycling, in track cycling in the UK in the, in the very early part of the 21st century, the biggest change there was money that allowed riders of both genders, of mainly men in that era, but allowed riders of both genders to be full time to take it seriously, to, to, to approach cycling the way they knew would work. And it's just giving people that opportunity. It's it's, it's just money.

50:10 And that's the balance. Isn't that here, some people in some ways don't like the way that cycling is becoming more commercial and more things, but equally that's bringing more money into the sport and I guess encouraging particularly on the women's side, allowing sort of more progression. So I guess it's always a balance of the of the two sides, but let maybe shifting to the aerodynamic side. So obviously that has been a made change, but in what sense? So would you out of let's say the bike, the skinsuit, the helmet, if, if you were to take the width is the one thing that you think has been the most dominant and and how would you

50:57 say that's progressed? Of of the components, I think all the things, it depends where you start. It's the same as I run wind tunnel sessions and somebody comes and says, oh, you know what, what's the most important thing going to be? And I say what? It depends how you're, it depends how you arrive. So there is that. It depends if your baseline bike is from 2010 or from 2000 because they were very different. In the time I've been involved in it. The biggest change I think has been just looking at equipment issues. I think the biggest change has probably been skin suits because in the period of time I've been looking at this property, the

51:39 bikes the bikes were were decent. We've had very few really bad bikes in the last 15 years. There've been a few, but most decent manufacturers produce decent bikes. The wheels have been pretty decent, but the skin suits have have really moved on because if even sort of up to I mean the, the, the real watershed for that was probably 2008, which was the, the, the GB plastic skin suits which were non air permeable and tripped had like tripped seams on them. And all the riders had lessons on how to put them on so that the trips were in the right place. And you would talk to riders in the track squad said we had a, had a session a few, a couple of

52:28 weeks before the Olympics where we all got our Olympic suits and we were allowed to wear them. And we all went onto the track to do kind of training efforts. And suddenly we were setting PBS left, right and centre. And we, we just, we just couldn't believe it because they told us about these amazing suits. And we thought, well, skin suit's a skin suit, you make it tight, it doesn't flap, doesn't have any wrinkles there we are job done. And we put these things on and suddenly people were riding, you know, 2 seconds a kilometre faster. And that that was a real wake up. Those suits immediately got banned. But at that point, everybody suddenly was saying, OK, so this

53:02 is this is not as simple as we thought. And the first skin suit projects I was involved with were already happening by the end of 2008. And this was the lead up to the London Olympics, I guess, where the the real sort of moment happened. Yeah, yeah, they, I mean the UCI changed the regulations so that all the skin suits had to be a tech had to be a textile suit basically the rule which you had to be able to blow through it. So it had to be a nested fabric essentially. And I think the assumption was that that was going to be the end to this kind of plastic skin suit, the larky. But you had a very rapidly discovered that what you do with textures and trips it it all

53:46 still works on a on a textile suit. And actually, a textile suit is much better because you couldn't wear one of the plastic suits for a 40K time child, because you'd be like a boil in the bag checking every, you know, you, if you wrote, if you wore one of those suits, you couldn't you, you couldn't feel the air hitting you apart from your knees and your face. It was, I mean, I never wore one, but everyone I know who did said it was a very old sensation because you did big tall over shoes that came to just below your knees and your shorts that came all of us. So they said the only place you, your kneecaps would feel cold

54:17 and everything else would be cooking. And as soon as you transfer all of that know how to making a textile so you can write, you can wear it for a 40K time trial. And suddenly it, it, it's of interest to world tour teams because world tour teams aren't interested in riding 16 laps of a track. World tour teams are interested in riding 40 kilometers. So suddenly there's a lot of interest. There's a bit more funding and the differences you were seeing in terms of total global drag on on a bike rider, you're seeing differences of four or 5% between old skin suits and you know, the good well fitted modern, you know, current suits,

54:55 which is it's just huge. It's, it's more than you're going to get from a bike and unless you're moving from like a real old steel bike with exposed cables and round forks and all the rest of it. But it's, it's that kind of it's, it's covering, you know, maybe two or three generations of bike development. So I suppose covering a couple of generations of suit development, but you know. So is that maybe translating it to the to the world tour teams, the people that maybe we see on TV? So they're all wearing, from what I understand, sort of skin suit or or or partial skin suits almost all the time. Yeah, not a lot of jerseys around anymore.

55:34 So the difference, I mean that. So therefore that must explain some of the difference in the speed from like the 1990s. So four 5% and they're going faster. So I guess the influence of the skin suit is also therefore bigger. Would you say that is a a sort of one of the key elements that is making them if you put a skin suit on one of the 1990s riders, they would probably also go 4% faster or? Something on a on a, on a time trial yeah, it's fairly simple. It translates across it's more complicated on a road stage because there were a a big a big grant or a road stage for AGC rider is almost certainly getting decided uphill where aerodynamics counts for a little

56:20 bit less. You then need to factor in how much energy have they saved by being more aerodynamic for the excuse me, how much, how much would they say about being more aerodynamic for the sections of the race where they're sitting in the wheels? What influence is the aerodynamics having on their their domestics or maybe trying to control the race because they're not controlling it at a slightly higher speed. So is everybody riding at the same intensity but going because if you're riding at the same intensity but just going faster on the flat, it's not going to do you much good. When you get to uphill, it's because you'll have put in the same amount of effort and

56:54 suddenly you're riding up hills of aerodynamics matters less. And actually it's kind of a wash. If you're at a time trial, clearly it matters if you are, you know, if you've got better technology than than than another team and you can launch a one or two of your riders off up the road in a brick, well then you can make the other team work that much harder because your aerodynamics is better on a, on a road stage. It's quite complicated because you know, it's all you've achieved is everybody's going faster or have you managed to find some way to make your aerodynamic advantage count? So it, it, it plays into the tactics and it's not, it's not always straightforward.

57:32 Most of the time when we're looking at speed records in in World Tour cycling, in Grand Tours, we're we're just looking at climbing where the influence is a little bit smaller in terms of aerodynamics in that moment. But if the aerodynamics have saved you some energy getting to the climb. So it kind of depends how that balances out. Yeah. And that was a really rubbish answer. I'm sorry. I didn't really, I didn't really give you anything you could work with there at all. I said it's complicated. I should have said that and shut up, no? No, no. The reason I say is I'm always wondering if when you watch and, and obviously we can get into

58:12 this, you know, when, if you watch the commentary on TV or the analysis afterwards. If you take Formula One, it is very well established that the car plays a huge part to the point that it even outweighs the driver and that there's no way that someone with a lesser car is going to, you know, go as well. But with cycling, unless I'm mistaken, it's not often as much discussed that the the bike they're using or their skin suit I think could actually be making a difference. If it's only 30 seconds, they win. But do do, do you see that or do you think the difference between the teams is not as big or or do you think that is actually one of the reasons why one team

58:59 could be sort of doing better? Yeah. I mean, I think it can. I think that can happen certainly on the track you see some very tight margins in, in things like pursuits and kilos and the timed events. And quite certainly, yeah, at that point the technology can make a difference. It also depends a little bit what you define as the technology. If you take AI mean I've taken bunch race track riders to the wind tunnel to work on their position on the bunch bike on like a, a drop handlebar upright bike. And then you see one of them clipping off the front in a scratch race four or five laps before the end. There's a question of how, how are they going to stay away from

59:41 the bunch? So if you can pick them up, let's call it a quarter of a second a lap and they've got 16 laps to stay away. Well, then that's that's 4 seconds. And you haven't gained that through hardware or skin suits. You've just gained that through education, but you can get, I think you get the same thing. I've certainly seen kind of elite level world championship time trials that are being won by someone who, had they been riding the equipment of the guy who came second, well, yeah, they'd have been second. A lot of the time the margins are big enough that it doesn't make any difference. But as soon as you're down around, if you're into anything

1:00:19 much under a second a kilometre, there's the potential for a good. I think the best world tour type set up to get that kind of margin over an average to per world tour type set up. So as soon as you're into that bracket, you have to accept the possibility that maybe the guy that won it won it because of, of, of the kit he was using. But it's, you know, he's also to some extent he or she's also responsible to some extent for that kit. There are choices that get made. The team decides where it's spending money, It decides what bike sponsor it's going with. There's a tendency to regard that as kind of an act of God.

1:00:57 And it's a series of decisions that a team and a writer have made. And you know, if you go to Formula One, I read an article a couple of days ago that was speculating on why Mercedes last season wasn't Mercedes F1 produced a terrible car that bounced up and down. And there was, I read an article that was speculating why that was and it was talking about kind of they reckon the wind tunnel team had got it wrong. And then regarding the wind tunnel team, that's, you know, it's, it's not as if the wind tunnel team are a different thing from the drivers of the team at the race. It's, it's all one organization. It's, it's the same in cycling. People are, you know, making

1:01:30 these decisions and and doing the research. That's, that's kind of what I'm wondering if the next few years evolution or five years of Pro Cycling is going to go more into the equipment because they are going faster. And as soon as they see that actually their setup can be more, then it will only increase the investment because they see it as legitimate area to advance. And, and to sort of, as you said, even just saving the domestic, if they have to do 20 watts less, they're going to be fresher. They can, they can push more. Whereas I liked having one of your articles and I think we're all, we've all felt that, that how do you really know the

1:02:13 difference between 2 bikes? You know, every advertisement comes out that is 8 watts more efficient or something. And then you think, yeah, but what rider was on that bike? You know, what was the system level drag? And it all seems a bit hand WAVY. You know, it doesn't seem very like scientific. And, and, and if you go to I read a white paper of a bike that was saying it was, what was it? How come it was it 10 watts faster than their leading competitor, who they didn't name. And if you look at the white paper, they were testing at 55 kilometres an hour and 30° y'all, which is, yeah, that's a blow you off your bike type CrossFit.

1:02:48 At that point, you're not worrying about how fast you're going. You're just trying to stay on the road. Yeah, it's, yeah, I, I, I, I think, I think you're right. I think that can be quite difficult to keep track of. I think the good teams are already doing a lot of this because they're well aware of, you know what we've talked about, which is, you know, if you can save energy, if you can make life easier for, for your dumb mistakes. Even if you're making if, if, if you've got a team that's got AGC rider and, and maybe a sprinter in it and you are responsible for controlling the race for stage after stage after stage. If you can do that for 20 watts

1:03:23 less cost day after day after day for your whole team, after three weeks, you've, you've saved a lot of energy. So I think the good teams are already working with their, their sponsor, we're working with their equipment suppliers to, to try to get these things right. And certainly if you, it's interesting how much World Tour riders know about everyone's equipment because they all talk to each other. So you'll find them, you know, one, the the entire bunch will know whose helmet is the fastest because they'll be told one of the riders will have done the testing for it in a wind tunnel. And then there are the results.

1:03:55 And they'll say, yeah, we tested our helmet, we tested yours, we tested theirs. We tested those guys. Our helmet was 5 watts faster than yours, 10 watts faster than theirs. They all, they all kind of know that stuff. And I think, yeah, a lot of the the better funded teams can afford to take, can afford to take this seriously. And there is a trickle down of knowledge because you can get quite a long way by just going. And you know, if you go around and ask asking writers in the bunch what the best stuff is, they know they'll tell you. And that then gets fed back to equipment manufacturers. And there's a certain amount of kind of cross, cross

1:04:31 pollination. Let's be polite about it and not call it theft. If somebody comes up with a good shape or a good idea or, or even like a good tunnel protocol. Sometimes your engineers talk to each other and somebody finds like a good way to test helmets that is produces better results in the real world. You know, this, this stuff isn't, kind of isn't sealed off from each other. So there is, there is kind of a, a level of progress, but it's very difficult for one team to suddenly find 2 or 3% that that nobody else is finding because everyone's everyone's working at it at the same time. Yeah, and I guess the, but the counter example, I guess to some of the aero is some of the

1:05:15 sprinters like, you know, Milan, who are these massive guy where you think surely aerodynamically they must be paying a massive penalty and yet they're doing like nearly 2000 watts or something. And you think, OK, well, I guess if you're powerful enough, aerodynamics doesn't really matter. But then you have these other riders who are like in a tiny little ball. So I guess there's always a a balance, isn't? It I mean, you go, there have been there biomechanical issues just in terms of how how particular riders get the par right. I mean, yeah, if you're sprinting at 2000 watts, well, aerodynamics counts for something because you're you're only trying to win by half a

1:05:55 wheel or less. And you might only have effectively a single. If you couldn't. I would think of it as kind of a Sprint, a Rotary Sprint that's happening over more or less a single lap of the track. But you can get in 1/4 of a second at a lap in aerodynamics if, if you've got to get good versus bad, you're not kind of really having to deal with the the absolute outliers. So, yeah, you can gain that, but if you're doing it, you're compromising what someone can do in terms of their power. You you have to balance those things. And for those guys, yeah, it works out a bit differently. I mean, I know one sprinter who talked about one thing, longer

1:06:32 axles on his pedals because he felt that gave him more leverage as he throws the bike from side to side. He's got more width. So I'm, I'm not completely convinced about that, but it's one of, you know, it's an interesting example of the kind of thing that actually, if you were looking at the system properly, that's one of the things you would, you would have to look at because it's not in most cycling, most endurance cycling is centrally governing that. It's got to do with the heart, the lungs, the aerobic system. Those kind of sprints aren't bio mechanically, they're very different and you could produce a better, a better aerodynamic solution, but you would be well

1:07:10 advised to do it in consultation with with with the bio mechanics. Now one of the things that I found interesting when I was doing some stuff myself with BC was the riders. And I'm just wondering how you have found this, which is I observed quite a lot of like superstition almost. And you know, people felt like this is better. Do riders now more firmly trust sort of aerodynamics advice and positioning advice or how much do you find? There is still a gut feelings and and and superstition. I don't. I don't know if you understand what I'm getting at. Yeah, I, I understand the question. I, I think there's been such a history of the science being

1:08:00 right that most riders at the very least acknowledge that they ought to try things. The, the, the GB sprinters were the first guys who turned up with 35 centimetre minimum width bars. And as I understand that a lot of that had to do with Chris Hoy, because all the most sprinters in 2000 and seven, 2008, if you said, right, we need you to race in 35 centimetre bars, they'd say, oh, no, we won't have the, we won't have the leverage, we won't have the control. We can't do that. And, and Chris, I think said, I tell you what, let's try it. The only way we're going to find out. Let's let's go and do a Nation's Cup or something and we'll do it

1:08:42 on the narrow bars and we'll see how it works. And, and it worked. And it's one of the reasons you need those riders in your team is that you want somebody like him to say, let's try it. Jason Kenney was kind of the same. He would be a guy who would who would say, OK, new bike, yeah, let's try it. And, and if he tried it and liked it, a lot of the other riders would go, well, if it's good enough for Jason, it's good enough for us. But yeah, I think, I think bike riders, if you test people at a tunnel, it's surprising how often they turn up and say, I do this because of this. There would have been a point. There would have been a point

1:09:25 kind of before I was really at a point where more I was in in the tunnel as a subject than in the tunnel as a technician. But they're doing points where people had turned up and said, I, I want my, I want my elbow shoulder width apart because that's in front of my knees because that's fastest because that test. And often they'd be talking back to things like Chris Borbon did his first tunnel sessions way back in 1992 for the Barcelona Olympics. They said, OK, you need your arms flat and you need them knee width apart. So it all lines up and fairly basic testing also running at 0 yo because they're getting ready for the track. But 20 years later, you people

1:10:04 who would still be that because that was a data point that they'd had faith in for 20 years something. And they, they and there was a logic to it and you'd sort of say, well, we need, well, let's change that. And there be a bit of resistance just because firstly, they genuinely think it's fast. And secondly, if they're wrong and they've spent 20 years getting this wrong. So there's almost like a, some cost policy to it as a superstition isn't yeah, I know what you mean by superstition. It's not really what we're dealing with, but it's, it's just people who tested something or have a friend who tested something. I think it's got lesser because

1:10:39 more people test individually and accept that it's different for different people. I mean, I still occasionally you read magazine features on what's the fastest helmet. You go, well, that's really an answer to that question. It's you can find the fastest helmet on you for a particular race if we're going to be picky. But I think it's less of that because I think there's much more of an acceptance that it is quite individual and you have to find what works for you and what works for you. Even if you look at things like the team pursuit squads now, it's not at all unusual. It's usually 4 riders wearing four different helmets.

1:11:14 And it's not that long ago they would always have worn matching helmets because they're one, because one of the riders who would have done all the tunnel testing so one of the riders would have optimized their set up. And all the other riders who wear what they wore because the assumption was, well, this helmet is fastest on Lucy, so it's going to be fastest on the other 3. And you know, it's, it's not. If you're going to get really picky, you can start sort of saying, well, which is the fastest helmet on what rider in what position in the string? Because it doesn't depend on the rider in front. And you can disappear down, down a rabbit hole plenty.

1:11:51 Plenty of engineers these days don't because you can find you can find very small margins of these things. And how much? I mean, we spoke at the beginning about track testing, so you know, you have power meters and obviously you have the the real thing. So I mean for certainly for track testing. But how much have you seen wind tunnels change and evolve and transform the sport? Would you say that wind tunnels have been one of the biggest influence and the fact that you can more readily go to them like the Silverstone facilities? It's it's it's made a yeah. It's made a very big difference because most of the serious riders now will test

1:12:37 individually in a wind tunnel and you don't have to go back that far. Before wind tunnel testing was something really only done by a handful of top end riders and top end teams. And even then they wouldn't test all the riders they would do. They had one or two riders who would do all the testing. Sometimes even riders who weren't even competing anymore would do all. Jason Queley did a huge amount of testing for Team GB after he retired. They did a lot of Skintoot testing with Jason. So yeah, it's the availability of it has made a difference in that firstly individuals go to a wind tunnel, they find stuff out and it's it's much faster than

1:13:13 track testing, It requires less skill than track testing and you can get a lot more data. There is to me a little bit of a debate in that you can produce vast amounts of data from a wind tunnel session, but how it translates to the real world, Sometimes it's very easy to produce a riding position at a wind tunnel that a that a rider then will not do. In reality. If you test on the track, you're testing in a slightly more realistic environment. Partly that's the skill of the the wind tunnel arid analysis. Partly it's properly briefing the rider and partly it's the rider understanding what they need to do. So you can get things badly wrong in a wind tunnel, but you

1:13:54 can also in three hours in a wind tunnel, you can belt through maybe 25 or 26 different setups. And if you think about the sheer physical nature of doing 25 setups 16 laps a time, so that's 25 times, that's 100 kilometers. You know you're going to ride 100 kilometers in a day at race pace, at that pursuit pace, That's that's not going to happen. So that their wind tunnels have made a very big difference. And they have the actual, the tunnels that we use have improved in that they've become much more focused on what we need from them. We started off using aerodynamics tunnels and motorsport tunnels, which are fundamentally designed to do

1:14:33 something slightly different, so that that's helped a lot. The tunnels have got better. One of the things that I've been interested to know your thoughts on this that I saw as a challenge is sort of repeatability because you've got a human in a tunnel who you're asking to be in a position and then you're trying to test the difference between two things that may only have a very marginal difference. And I remember, you know, various people have started to explore, you know, mannequins and then moving mannequins. And I kind of wonder how that, again, that's all my interest between the F1 and the cycling. I just kind of wonder where this

1:15:18 is going to, where this will go to. Are we going to have some, you know, robotics moving around to replicate? Yeah. How challenging is it to really find the gain when there may be a difference in the rider, the way that they, you know, sit on the bike? It repeats, repeats, repeats. You just do it again and again and again. If you've got the time, you just do the repeats. I mean, anything down below half a percent starts to starts to be in the noise for a normal rider and a normal test. And for most decent riders, you know, if you're a decent male world tour level rider, that's a couple of watts. If somebody says, oh, we did such and such and we found a

1:16:01 Watt, I say, how many times did you do it? And if they say once, I say, well, you don't really know. In that case, maybe it's good, maybe it's not. Do it 3 or 4 times, get it 3 or 4 times, then yeah, it's probably real. And that as you, as you get to finer and finer, let you know finer trying to get finer and finer resolution, you, you can do more repeats. Some riders are really good at it. I did a skin suit project using a team rider who was phenomenal in terms of her repeatability. You would kind of do a test you'd say, right, get off the bike, walk around the tunnel for two minutes, get back on the bike. Let's do that again. Try to hit the same position and

1:16:43 she perfectly regularly would be careful of doing 3 or 4 baseline runs within .2% of each other, which you'd nearly see that much variation if you just did a bare bike in the tunnel. So if you find one of these people, if you're developing a skin suit or developing a helmet or something, you find one of these people, you hang on to them. It's no coincidence that she was a scientist. She, she's a doctoral and she's got a, a science PhD, so she understands what you're trying to do and how important it is. A lot of riders can do kind of, yeah, under .5% levels of repeatability. And if you want to start looking at things like wheels or tyre interfaces and you want to do it

1:17:25 with a live rider on the bike, either you, you, you preferably you find someone who's good at it and you, you do several repeats. And if you do that, you can get to at a pretty granular level. What of course you then struggle to do is validate on the road whether that's really worked because it's now such a small margin. You're taking a lot of trust out of the tunnel. And you know, you get to a level where I think we worry a lot about the repeatability in the tunnel and maybe not enough about the validation back out into the real world. Because wind tunnels are quite artificial environments. The air in them is, it's been through that lovely honeycomb.

1:18:01 So it's, it's all unturbulent and flowing and lovely parallel lines. Go out into the real world, go and ride a world tour time trial where there's kind of there's a motorbike up the road, There's maybe a guard bike. They've been, you know, you're maybe if you catch another rider, you're going to be in the, in the wash of their team car for maybe two or three minutes. And it's, I think one of the things that we're going to see in the next 10 years is better examination of the real world conditions because we've got quite good at designing things that work really well in wind tunnels. I'm not completely convinced that all of that transfers into

1:18:39 into the real world. Well, and that's. Even at a really basic level, you know the the go no. No. I'm going to see even at a really basic level you're dealing with a bike that's built into the floor. So the bike doesn't doesn't do that. So if you think a little bit slight, how does that do to the what does that do to the effective Yaw angle? Because almost nobody rides in a ruler straight line. So you know you're dealing And then if you've got slightly different Yaw angles or the Yaw angle, the same for the front wheel as it is for the rest of the bike. Yeah, and that's. Probably in practice the difference it makes is quite

1:19:20 small, but we're starting to look for very small margins. Now that's so interesting. And I think to your point in F1, from speaking to some colleagues who still work in F1, I think that is the growing challenge of exactly that, of correlating. You know, many, like you said, the Mercedes issue, a lot of it is because they develop in the wind tunnel and then go to track. And when they test on the track, they don't necessarily see and they're like, how do I know? And what's the difference between the wind tunnel and the track? But they can't do track testing to the same extent. But that leads me to the other. Now this is sort of my a lot of my focus, but I'm interested.

1:20:02 What your opinion is this, particularly as a someone who does a lot of testing and coaches and works with companies, CFD computational fluid dynamics is sort of build and certainly if you look in the automotive sector as part of the solution because you can model things and you're not confined to the limitations of a wind tunnel, but you have accuracy issues. How much have you seen that be used in the development of helmets and bikes more so than just pretty pictures? Or is is it still the case that it's slightly not trusted and people still really use the wind tunnel as their, you know, development tool? Most most of what I've been involved in has really just used

1:20:51 used the tunnel. I've really only used CFD to help visualize flow patterns to think well, OK, that's interesting. There's a big low pressure area there. That might be an interesting place to put a bottle fill in that low pressure area, things like that. It's also fair to say that most of what I've been involved in, I've done more riders and skin suits and things like that, which is kind of bluff body aerodynamics, which isn't really CF DS absolutely strong suite. It's getting better at it, but if if you try to develop a skin suit using CFD, you might get it right, you might get it wrong. To be honest. It'll give you some things to

1:21:34 play with when you get to the tunnel, but you could nearly just as well have made a few more prototype suits and and done them in the tunnel Hardware like bikes and helmets. CFD is a much more powerful tool. I haven't done a lot of that. Helmets I think is a a very a very useful place for CFD. Bikes are a great place for CFD, not least because in suits and and riding positions and so on, you're working within some some quite tight constraints. The shapes and positions and things you do with bikes, despite the UCR rules, there's quite a lot of space to play with, like the the Hope Lotus bike that, that, that, that Team

1:22:15 GB use. That's not what the UCI expected when they made the rules. The UCI thought they'd come up with a set of rules that produce a normally shaped bike and suddenly you arrive and go, well, here's here, here's a different thing. And if you wanted to make a series of randomly shaped bikes and put them in a wind tunnel, you'd have made a lot of prototypes before you got to that. So it it particularly for hardware, it can be a great way of producing models to look at and and paradigms to experiment with because the the the danger of any wind tunnel testing is that you perfect the role model by my favorite was the forks that Team GB did for 2008, which

1:22:58 were very, very narrow and just hugged just down the disk and flared out to the hub. And then 2012 they suddenly produced a set of forks that were the absolute opposite and going in the direction of the hope notice bike. And it kind of turns out that it doesn't matter what you do to set a forks as long as you don't do the standard straight leg fork to the outside of the hub. Wider is better and narrowers. But obviously if you're doing this in a wind tunnel, you say, well, let's make a narrower report. You make one that's narrower, it's better. You go narrower again, we make it narrower again, you go brilliant, we've been done here. And what you never tried doing

1:23:33 was making it wider. You know, if you are one of the things I would do in the tunnel, if I'm working with a rider who's got time and they've got the budget to do it. Let's say we go down 10 mil on the, on the front end, very simple and really simple intervention. Make the, the, the elbow pads 10 mil lower and that's better. And we go down 20 mil and that's better again. And we go down 30 mil and that's a little bit worse. So you go great, 20 mil done, job done. If you've got the time, you should go up as well because up might be faster too. It might just be that your rider was in kind of a debts, but was in kind of the bottom of AU

1:24:07 somewhere. And, and, and you need to go in both directions. It's one of the problems is that because you're a bit limited on budget, you can end up taking your best guess at what I ought to work, finding it sort of works and deciding that that that's a triumph. Job done, Let's go home. When actually, you really ought to look up a lot of other options as well. Yeah, I think that's when. CFD can be good for that. Exactly, that's why I think the CFD does hold a lot of promise and but at least from my experience, the problem is Formula One is really complicated and so is cars. But cycling is far more complicated because you have

1:24:45 moving legs, which is incredibly difficult to model in CFD. You have transition effects by design with skin suits, and that's really difficult to model. And then you put them all together and you have a problem that's probably even harder than modelling a car or or an aircraft. And you're probably doing it with far less budget because there's just less money in in cycling than Formula One or or cars. So it feels to me there's so much more that could be done. You know, there's, there's more Ave. like you said, most of the time you come into a tunnel and you test 5 things rather than 500 things because you just can't manufacture 500 things.

1:25:28 But where maybe the question then to you is more around where should it go? Because you could extrapolate this and say, you know, aerodynamics is going to do more and more and more, but at what point do you think there should be the, where should the regulations sit to avoid it going too far? Where do you think there's a balance of the sport versus the, the technology? And is the balance correct now? Question of philosophy, really. What do you think the sport ought to be exactly? Do you? Let's go, let's wind it all the way back to the R The R record attempt that I made was on, it was called the Athletes R Record.

1:26:14 So you had to do it. The idea was you had to do it on Eddie Merck's bike. Basically you had to have a round chewed bike, which the UCI had kind of envisaged being made of steel, but you could make it or something else if you wanted with a pair of old fashioned drop handlebars. And the idea this was going to be completely standard. First thing any of us did when we got involved in this was that, OK, what I make a really long bike, what if make the bars really narrow? Let's get the spokes out of the wheel. You, you kind of and you ended up bringing all the same measuring and and testing to bear on up that you would have done to anything else.

1:26:47 You made less difference. But because the margins were small, you still have to do it in F1 works on the basis they're kind of going to restrict, effectively restrict either budget or in terms of either cash budget or time budget. And and they restrict the amount of testing, which is a very direct way of trying to level the playing field in terms of the budgets that people have to have to play with. I think it would be a difficult job to create that effect by changing the actual regulations because the tighter you make the regulations, you've got less literal space for innovation in terms of what shapes and things you can make things.

1:27:26 But you're still going to find the top teams looking for the margins and measuring them. So maybe, maybe you come up with a really tight set of skin suit regulations that make the difference in the best skin suit and the worst skin suit stops being 3% and it starts being 1%. You think you know, you, you, you, you think Vismo Lisa Bike are going to say, well, tell you what, we, we won't bother looking for that 1% anymore. That 1% matters even more. It matters just as much as it did before, because everyone's going to finish closer together, but the winner is still going to be the winner. I so I, I think doing that with regulations is really difficult.

1:28:04 And one of the, one of the things the UCI have done that's been a mistake in the past is they've actually tried. They haven't done it for a while. They've learned, I think they've tried to reduce costs by changing the regulations to make things more restrictive. And what you do every time you do that is give a huge advantage of the teams that have got the budget, because every time you change the regulations, you're starting again from scratch. So whoever's got the biggest budget, you know, if the great example of that is if they'd left the plastic skin suit legal after 2008, by 2012 everyone would have had a plastic skin

1:28:34 suit and they would have been quite close together. They changed the regulations and Team GB particularly went, hey, that's great. We know how to develop skin suits and the know how from developing the plastic skin suits transfer straight across to developing a textile skin suit. We're going to have an even bigger advantage in London 2012. And that's kind of that's an example from kind of the last from a decade ago. But it it's, you will get that if you keep changing the regulations to try to keep costs down, you're just giving an advantage to the teams of the budget. You can now, you could now go and win a World Tour time trial

1:29:11 on a 5 year old time trial frame, which you could buy a third or fourth hand, get resprayed. In terms of budget, you could do that on the cheap. It's not, not particularly the issue because World Tour teams are getting their bikes free anyway. But that kind of type forming means that the, the, the, the playing field has become a little bit more level. Because if you can get the deltas between setups down from 5% to 2%, where you're much more than the in the area of, of what a rider can do now. Because if you have a 5% delta between a really good setup and a really bad setup, but a rider who's at the soggy end of that is going around looking for 20

1:29:50 watts to catch the guy at the front, If you can cut that down to 2%, suddenly he needs 7 or 8 watts. So, and in some ways, leaving things as they are is is not the worst approach. Or you find a way of saying we need to limit the amount of research you can do that then runs into problems because Specialized say do a new time trial bike and you say, oh, well, yeah, but you're developing that for a World Tour team. So you can only test that for so many hours. But they say, but we're selling this, we're not testing it. We're not testing it for, for, for Quickstep. We're testing it for all mankind. Anyone who wants to buy a bike, you know that that that would

1:30:27 get quite difficult. Yeah, it's and this is and that's the same loophole in F1 that you know, where there was like a certain team would, would develop things through one of their subsidiaries and then, you know, transfer the technology back. And as you say, it's very hard to to the loophole, but I, I guess maybe you would agree that it is still quite exciting times for cycling in that there is a lot more focus on it and there is a focus on the technology. And I actually think that's only a, in a way of good thing. Commercially it helps probably more sponsors want to come in because they see it as like an exciting technology sport as

1:31:05 well as the human side. And I guess my main question was just to make sure it doesn't create a too much of A like A2 tier system where it really is because of. The technology I think, I think, I think it produces more issues up to junior levels and things. I think that is more of a problem. I, you know, I, I have the National, the junior 10 mile time trial a couple of years ago was just down the road for me. And I went, I went over, actually I went over to report on it because the magazine, I write a column for it didn't have a report for it. So I said I'd go and do it, which is kind of my job from about 12 years ago. But I went and did that.

1:31:46 And I was chatting to a friend of mine who I used to race against and whose son was now racing. And that didn't make me feel old at all. But he said, yeah, his, his, his son's racing this year was going to cost him was at £15,000 and some of that things like accommodation. But he, he said that a certain amount of it is wind tunnel time now. And this is kind of this, this, this, this, this, this is a 17 year old rider who reckons to be competitive, he needs, you know, he needs good bike, he needs the best skin suit, he needs the tunnel time. And The thing is, it's one of the suggestions you find is, oh, we should, we should make junior

1:32:25 riders ride certain, you know, age of bike or they should have to ride a road bike, I think. But the problem is, it's, it's not, it's not the equipment, it's the tunnel time. And that's always what you, what you boil down to in any of this is that because you're not developing hardware, if you're developing a car, it's a hard object. If you're developing and, and you know, it's not like Mercedes developed one car for one driver and a different car for the other driver, there'll be clearly some mechanical set up differences, but in terms of the aerodynamics are the same. Because like things so individual, you need to test,

1:33:01 every rider needs to test individually. So it, it that, that produces a significant skew. And I don't know what that, that feels to me like more of a problem because once you're a world tour team, like once you're a world tour team, that's kind of it's a business. It's up to you how you how you run that, how successful you are. If you've got riders who are trying to make up and actually get into a good development squad, maybe get into in our national team to show what they could do there are the money can make much more of a difference there than it did 20 years ago. 20 years ago, the fastest 17 year old bike rider in the country, whoever won the the

1:33:38 junior national 10 was probably the fastest junior time Travis in the country. If it was very tight, maybe, but even then they aired an average kind of luck. So it didn't feel quite the same. Now you might have someone who's winning the national junior national 10 by 2 seconds who has done 10 hours of wind tunnel time squeaking in in a couple of seconds in front of someone who hasn't done anything. You think well, quite honestly. And if you are looking, if you're a team manager looking to assign someone, you can't even look at these two guys and go, oh, well, you see, this guy is riding a disc shave. It's a great bike. He's got like, you know, he's

1:34:11 got a nice pair of unmoulded nice pair of moulded watch out bars. He's riding a great set up. This guy's riding a steel bike from 1999. I know which one of them is faster. If it's, if it's, you know if. If the difference between them was wind tunnel testing, you can't even see that anymore. Yeah, that, that's a very good point actually. And I guess the problem is then it may be the case that they get selected to, you know, to make it as a professional. I guess the teams do look at the Physiology, don't they? Look at their, you know, power numbers and, and I guess there's. Serious stuff. Yeah, Yeah, it's true. But but, but it's also

1:34:49 attracting attention because if you know, nobody's looking at the Physiology of three different random 17 year olds who turned up in the top ten of a National 10 somewhere. Because the National 10, there's not, it's not even particularly where people find the next big rider. They mean is much more road race based and that probably is a bit fairer. But there still is, you know, there still is this to me. And to me, that kind of that level of the sport is more of an issue than the the elite level. Well, this has been fascinating and I'm sure we can continue talking for hours. And so I love, this is what I love about cycling. There's so many like little

1:35:25 rabbit holes where it does make a difference. And it's, it's sort of the beauty, I guess, of, of cycling in the cycling industry. But what, what's going on with you over the, you know, the next 12 months? So are you. So you're writing a a book. You're doing still more. Just finishing a book at the minute. Yeah, great. And. Can you say when that's coming out or is I don't want to put you on the spot? It will be out next. It'll be June 2025. That'll be out great. And then what about the? Look forward to that, yeah. The, the commentating is that something you're that you love doing? It's, I actually love listening, especially when you have

1:36:07 somebody who knows something about aerodynamics and they can sort of like chip in, especially like doing time trials or things like that. Yeah, I do a bit of that. I, I, I do sort of do tend to do the world sort of world Championship, European Championship, time trials, a few other odds and ends. I probably don't do, I don't think I do as much commentary as people think. I'll probably only maybe do 10 days a year. I, I mean, I, I enjoy doing it. It's, yeah, I very, very happily do more of it. But it's one of those things you're always sort of struggling to fit in. And there are I, I tend to do say, more time chatting and road

1:36:41 racing. I'd like to do more road race commentary, but you end up kind of pigeonholed slightly because that's the side of the sport you know a lot about. And they're always looking for people who know about time chatting because most, most pro cyclists hate time training. So the last thing on earth they want to do is spend the day talking about it. Whereas I said I'll bring out four hours to talk about time training. So, but hopefully, yeah, I'll be keeping keeping that up for the next couple of years. Amazing, Amazing. What? I'll, I'll put some links for people to look because you've already got a couple of books

1:37:14 out. They're great. Obviously there's the second weekly column and some of the other things that you've done. So I'll, I'll, I'll put some links below so people can catch up because there was stuff we didn't manage to talk about that I think people could catch up on. But yeah, really appreciate you coming to chat all things Arrow and cycling and yeah, thanks so much. Music.