crank it up

The big dawgs are lightin' it up in richmond right now:



that in-car shot of tony stewart's left rear quarter panel isn't too far off the fifty minutes of "rear quarter panels" I got a view of today during the Barrio Logan Grand Prix crit here in socal.

It was this race that put a severe crimp in my season last year... I got taken down late in the race and crashed pretty hard causing some bad things to happen to my rotator cuff. Anyway, I hadn't really planned on racing barrio logan this year, but since they finally added back the M35+ category, I had to support the local racing scene!

Well, I tailgunned it - but I really didn't have much of a choice - I haven't been going so well this year. If I had to put my finger on a single reason for the lack of power I've been seeing this year, I'd put that finger on all those long tempo rides I did last fall in preparation for ironman arizona. Regardless of the cause, though, I am just not pedaling the bike as well as I'd like to at this point. It'll turn around eventually, though, I reckon!

Anyway, it got kinda hard about 10 minutes into the race and that's when the race for 1st ended - six guys went up the road and 3 or 4 of them were sportin' Amgen jerseys. I think anthony galvan finally took it while continuing to sport his ibike power meter on the handlebars. nice!

it was pretty mellow in the back, and I went hard for the last few laps before coasting across the line with my sweet "2nd tier" field sprinting capabilities for a top 10 field finish. Much better than last weeks dana point debacle, where I had to pick myself up off the pavement with six or seven to go before snagging a top twenty.

I'm not sure I'll be doing the Dana Point race next year - too many doodz (master's racers nonetheless) willing to risk contact with steel barriers in pursuit of weekend "glory".

hey, I'm glad I got back on the barrio logan "horse" again, though - it's a cool race that's been around for quite some time. Eventually, the city will repave those roads, and boy that will make things a whole lot safer!

Before I left to go racing in old barrio logan this morning, I re-tested several tires on my rollers in the garage in order to determine their coefficient of rolling resistance. This time around I used my old-skool yellow wired powertap that I purchased used. As it turns out, things were pretty consistent with the SRM that I used last fall for similar testing.

I managed to take some pics of a couple of the "fancier" aero-featured tires - whoa, those weren't rotated like that originally!:


bontrager tire


zipp tire

the bontrager tire has a little "wing" as they call it that tries to fill in the gap between the tire sidewall and the outboard corner of the clincher rim (a mavic open pro is what my powertap is laced onto in the pics). That wing is claimed to improve aerodynamics, just as the dimples on the zipp tire are claimed to improve aerodynamics. Only the wind tunnel knows if these features are significant enough to rise above the "noise" of marketing wishful thinking, though, eh?

speaking of "noise" - let me tell you, those dimples make a heck of a lot of noise when ridden on 4.5" aluminum kreitler rollers. holy crap, not only were they noisy, but the high frequency vibration that I could feel through my chamois was pretty annoying as well! I wouldn't want to do a long roller session on these suckers.

I wonder how much those dimples cost on the supply side of things in addition to the demand side of things (the crr of the zipp @120 psi was only slightly worse than the veloflex @ 60 psi according to my quick experiment).

Interesting stuff!