Originally Posted by
grwoolf
This report (link below) has a heavy bias, but still interesting. It doesn't answer the acceleration question, but they claim 19 watts saving between their edmonda road bike and the aero madone with a rider on it at ~40k. I'm sure it's an optimistic number, but it was enough to get me to shell out some bucks for a new madone frame after I test rode one. I've got about 2 weeks of riding on it. I won't speculate on the aero benefit (all new bikes are faster), but it's a great bike even if you ignore the aero factor. I've raced it a couple times and had it out on a couple fast group rides and it's just a fantastic riding bike.
http://brimages.bikeboardmedia.netdn...epaper_min.pdf
I saw one of those at the driveway thursday, in matte black. I would personally never dare to race on one of those, due to murphy's law. But I agree it's interesting to see the data. seeing that they used the same component/wheel setup on all their bikes in the wind tunnel, it's surprising to see the huge delta in grams of drag. general rule of thumb that I've found from slowtwitch is that 50g drag at 30 mph is roughly 5W difference. If you extrapolate that to a 400g delta at 30mph, that's roughly a 40W difference, which is significant... so in real world testing, this should manifest itself pretty clearly (I think)