I've been meaning to see if the local bent shop has a Q45 to test. I would like to do long distance touring again someday, and the Q45, a foldable trike with 26 inch wheels or a velomobile are in consideration.
The idea of adding a velomobile to my collection really appeals to me, but I'd need a trailer or a big van to take it anywhere. There's one guy who occasionally rides what looks like a Milan on my favorite trail, but he's very slow. I watched him just crawling along at ~15 mph, and wondering why he'd want to pedal that heavy sled when he'd probably be faster on a conventional upright.
The forces against you at 20 mph mostly linear on a racing recumbent. At 15 mph, a velomobile is really just a heavy tricycle. Cubic. That is why small aero improvements can be far more significant than say a 10% increase in power. You must have had some of that math in college...
Only in my structural engineering courses; nothing to do with aerodynamics. It's well known that drag is proportional to the square of the velocity, but abstractions like these don't give you any sense of what it means in real world comparisons. I would have thought the M1's aero advantage over the M5 would have been more obvious even at modest speeds, but apparently not. I also wouldn't have guessed that at ~30 mph it's advantage over the M5 would be as great as it is. It's hard to imagine that all it would take is to increase my power output by another ~20-30 watts to do a 10 mile TT at 30 mph.
I also noticed how completely outclassed a TT bike is compared to my M1. Here's a comparison between me and a TT racer going by the name 'Fill K' on a four mile segment.
Fill K: average speed 26.3 mph @
302 watts
Me: average speed 27.6 mph @
203 watts
Now, imagine the speed I would have gone with an extra 100 watts on the M1.
I'm really surprised none of my records have gotten red flagged yet. These young racers must be scratching their heads, wondering how some old dude nobody has heard of is getting these sorts of results.
