As a cyclist, I am always in search of aerodynamic gains:
Sadly, George Plimpton’s Y-Foil is not legal for the UCI-sanctioned events in which I will never take part, and so I may have to get myself a Stromm Rakt instead:
Not only that, but it’s also the most consonant-heavy UCI-legal road bike. See, “Stromm Raktt” has 10 letters, but only two of them are vowels. That gives it a Vowel Factor of only .2. (For a bike’s Vowel Factor simply divide the number of vowels by the total number of letters and numbers in the bicycle’s name. The Lower the “V-Factor” the better.) Just compare that to other UCI-legal road bikes:
Colnago Y1Rs
V-Factor: .27 (.36 if you count the “Y”)
Specialized S-Works Tarmac SL8
V-Factor: .31 (if you count the hyphen you can shave it down to .30)
Canyon Aeroad CF SLX 7
V-Factor: .33 (non-“Y”-adjusted), plus Canyon Aero sounds an awful lot like Canyonero:
So the Stromm Raktt is absolutely annihilating the competition–and we haven’t even been in the wind tunnel yet.
According to the article, when a company says it’s made the fastest UCI-legal bike ever, “you have to sit up and listen:”
Do we though? It seems to me that if you’re in search of aero gains then sitting up is the last thing you should do, and at that point you might as well Just Buy A Rivendell Already:
Though of course in addition to the upright, non-aero position you’ll also lose the “transient aero” benefits you can read about in the bike’s white paper:
See, in 2025, all bikes need to have white papers:
[PDF]
By the way, the Colnago white paper is fascinating. For example, in it I learned that their model is twice as accurate as other models:
This is because other models using the standard method showed that the Colnago Y1Rs was not the fastest bike, whereas Colnago’s own model did show that the Y1Rs was the fastest bike. This failure to confirm Colnago’s utter superiority points to obvious flaws in the standard method.
Stromm’s white paper was similarly enlightening. I mean, I would have thought the term “transient aero” referred to itinerant people using bicycles as getaway vehicles:
[Whiteboy getting “transient aero” as he flees from Adult Word.]
In fact, it refers to the way the air moves between your legs when you pedal. Strom do not refer to this as the Crotchal Vortex–but I do:
And by harnessing the Crotchal Vortex, you’ll have an “unfair advantage” when Cat 6-ing other riders on the bike path:
Though if it’s UCI-legal then how is that unfair? It seems to me that in this case you’d have a totally fair and legal advantage, unlike the one afforded to me on the banned Wife Oil. In any case, I remain skeptical of Stromm’s claims until they line their bike up along with the Colnago, the Specialized, and the Canyon, let them go, and see which one wins. I’m fairly certain that without a rider all four bikes would simply fall over, proving conclusively that there’s no such thing as “the fastest aerodynamic road bike,” UCI-legal or otherwise. But I can’t be certain until I see a white paper on it.
In the meantime, breaking wind remains cheaper than cheating it.