Originally Posted by
Cramic
Apologies if this is obvious. Just had my interest piqued today and a quick google search didn’t throw up anything.
How important is the bike in racing?
Take F1. The guy with the fastest car wins, 9 times in 10. A clever innovation will win, eg. Button’s Brawn. Similarly with running for a time. I wouldn’t say shoes have/are always paramount, but the advantage Vaporflys gave to the guys and girls who had them made a huge difference. I don’t follow the running scene as closely as I once did, but believe most running shoes have now caught up.
But I don’t often hear about the bike in cycling, which admittedly is limited to watching the odd stage in the Grand Tours and listening to Armstrong’s podcast.
Are the bikes, at the top end, all innovated out and everybody is essentially riding the same machine?
Are there many examples, in the history of cycling, were the bike was obviously the deciding factor? Eg. Grand Tour winners, in multiple years, that was all or mostly due to the bike? (Like Hamilton in his Mercedes or Schumacher in the Ferrari.) I’d be interested to hear any suspected or confirmed illegal innovations too…like the motors.
Thanks and hopefully this hasn’t been done too many times before.
You mention F1, and I love many aspects of F1, so you got my attention. I think there are a few times where the bike has made a difference, but those opportunities are now very hard to find, due to rules etc, and the fact that the largest limiting factor, the rider, is not a technical thing controlled by rules.
So in F1 probably the biggest limitations seem to be engine, turning tires on/off, aero efficiency, and aero downforce. There are instances where a lower tier team has insane straight line speed because they sacrificed everything, used their better engine, to make up for the lack of development in downforce/handling (I'm thinking Jos/Arrows for example, or Massa/Williams. You get the best drivers in those cars and it doesn't matter because at some point, if you can't go through a turn fast enough, you can't (legally) stay ahead.
However, in cycling, the biggest factor is the rider. This is why doping is so huge, because nowadays doping changes the characteristics of a rider. It's akin to increasing fuel flow in F1, or maybe the ingenious Toyota rally turbo cheat. Just like how engines are limited to how much energy they can extra from a certain amount of fuel, cyclists are limited to how much oxygen they can consume. If you can consume more, you can make more power.
Since the top tier riders are highly optimized, if not beyond their normal limits, they will have to run optimized equipment. Since bikes are basically like spec racing, there is very little opportunity for significant change. The cycling groups are drawn from the same limited companies, so like having the same transmissions, same engines. The frames are very, very similar, with minute differences between them. Wheels are also a commodity.
Many times a rider has used a controversial bike to win, but it was more a psychological advantage - the bike wasn't faster, and in fact may have been slower. But the rider believed, and so they rode harder.
Therefore really it comes down to the rider and their position.
There *have* been instances of equipment making a difference. One might argue that Lemond's 1989 Tour victory was due to the use of his aero helmet and aero bars (or, conversely, Fignon's non-use of aero bars that he had available, nor the aero helmet that he'd worn previously).
In 1990, in the TT that decided the Tour, Lemond used aero stuff - aero bars, rear disk. His opponent went with super thin 17 or 18mm tires but didn't use a full aero bar, and he raced on spoked wheels. Those wheels probably felt great rolling around a parking lot but at speed.... they're not super fast. Ditto the non-aero bars he used - I tried them in a TT and I realized it was a huge mistake just a few minutes into it. This might be comparable to making a bad tire call in F1, running intermediates 5 laps too early etc.
Another instance of equipment is when disk wheels were first introduced. Moser was a long way back going into the final TT of the Giro, Fignon was in the lead, and Moser absolutely demolished Fignon. Now, it could be that the TV helicopter hovering just behind Moser for duration of the TT might have helped, or the fact that he had an "elevator" of hands helping him all the climbs in the prior weeks might have made a difference. Or perhaps that Moser was one of the cycling pioneers of blood doping. But cynicism aside, if you consider a flat TT, no one would use a spoked rear wheel now.
There are so many other factors in play in bike racing, and with bike development somewhat plateaued, the bike is more a non-negative thing, meaning you don't want it to hurt you but it really doesn't "help" per se.