It has been another busy week with the Wattbike being displayed at shows, events and meetings all over the country, but without a doubt the most exciting visit was to Brawn GP to test Jenson Button. I will write a full blog post on that session, but for now will just say that he is just like he appears on TV, very down to earth and personable. We also did a bit of testing with his two engineers who were also great guys and very interested in the polar view, especially when they were slightly better than Jenson!
The Wattbike has also been used in filming for the new BBC Show Guestimation, a game sho, which will go out around the National Lottery on Saturday nights. The Wattbike was connected by the show’s technicians to a wall of lights with each one representing a number of Watts. The aim of the game is for two families to guestimate how much power the Olympic BMX rider Liam Phillips can produce. Obviously telling you would be to ruin the surprise, so you will have to look out for the Wattbike Guestimation Challenge to find out more. Liam has also been selected to represent Great Britain at the UCI World BMX Championships in Australia
Dave Gorman and ‘Something for the Weekend’ host Tim Lovejoy raced on Wattbikes in the BBC studio to highlight Dave Gorman’s cycling stand up tour of the UK. The Wattbikes were used for a 200m race, which, Dave Gorman won (although Ella Williamson reported that Tim Lovejoy had won). The report can be seen until Sunday 5th April on the BBC iPlayer and takes place 1 hr, 13 mins into the show.
Once interesting thing to note from the results is that although Tim produced the higher average power he did not actually have a higher average speed than Dave. The reason for this is the faster you travel the higher the amount of power required is to increase your speed, so Tim’s riding at a higher power output for a short period of time would not have produced a fast enough speed to pull away from the more consistent Dave Gorman. The same would be true on the road or track, the most efficient way to get from A to B is maintaining the highest continuous speed/power output, not sprint then rest, sprint then rest.
An audio slide show featured on the BBC Radio 4 website takes a look at the lessons that can be learned from British Cycling – the most successful team at the World Championships and Olympic Games. During the slide show the BBC Interviewer Adam Shaw met with Sir Chris Hoy who explained how the British Cycling team of coaches, athletes and support staff all aim for excellence in everything that they do. Over the last eight years we have worked very closely with British Cycling in the development of the Wattbike and have been impressed at every stage with the professionalism and focus on what it is that they are trying to acheive. British Cycling talk about the ‘aggregation of marginal gains’, they try and think of everything, and once they have thought of it, improve it. We have been able to benefit from that philosophy as we returned to them time after time with their previous tick list of requirements completed only to be presented with a new list. It was in that environment that the Wattbike was born and continues to develop. We are currently working on a number of developments to the software that should be available for download shortly.
Towards the end of the Audio Slide show Sir Chris also takes the opportunity to put Adam through the peak power test on the Wattbike to give him an idea of what it takes to be an Olympic Sprint Cyclist. Adam produces 992 Watts, compared to over 2300 Watts that Chris is able to produce. That can be a target for 2009!
Listen to the full Audio Slide show at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_7796000/7796283.stm
