Viewing 40 posts - 1 through 40 (of 103 total)
  • 650b Spicy – conclusively faster says Nico
  • chakaping
    Free Member

    The 2014 Lapierre Spicy has been revealed and Nico Vouilloz has shared his findings on the relative merits of 26in vs 650b wheels.

    Apparently the new bike is one second faster over a 2min 50sec run. Which I work out as around 0.35%.

    For once I think I do believe the hype.

    🙂

    rewski
    Free Member

    I read that on twitter and chuckled, obviously means a lot if you an pro enduro rider, of little consequence when you’re hurtling down the surrey alps 😉 Nice bikes though.

    torsoinalake
    Free Member

    Lapierre make really good looking bikes

    robbieh
    Free Member

    Just says to me that he,s a consistent rider over a set course. 1sec. Is nothing though except useful hype to sell bikes to the “must have,s”

    rewski
    Free Member

    Loving the black stanchions, you seen the new carbon disc guard too.

    butterbean
    Free Member

    The 650b juggernaut has set off for 2014 bikes.

    We should play a game of which of the big manufacturers will be left at the table offering 26″ bikes for anything other than DH (or other niche aspects like DJ).

    The first of many announcements. Of course it’s largely bollards, but it’s still happening.

    Faster or not, it will sell because of the wheels & it looks good.

    wobbliscott
    Free Member

    So that’ll be 0.7% quicker with 29″ wheels. Finally, we have closure on this debate!

    davidtaylforth
    Free Member

    Could be the difference between getting a KOM or not though?

    If you’re seriously into racing people from the internet then I reckon it’s worth the upgrade.

    butterbean
    Free Member

    It’s a shame the EI system can’t have integrated 3G/4G so you can have live KOM updates 🙁

    chakaping
    Free Member

    Could be the difference between getting a KOM or not though?

    If you’re seriously into racing people from the internet then I reckon it’s worth the upgrade.

    Where’s that credit card gone?

    davidtaylforth
    Free Member

    butterbean – Member
    It’s a shame the EI system can’t have integrated 3G/4G so you can have live KOM updates

    😀

    That would be real innovation. I think most would probably use it’s 3G capabilities for arguing on MTB forums though, rather than actually riding the thing.

    butterbean
    Free Member

    That would be real innovation. I think most would probably use it’s 3G capabilities for arguing on MTB forums though, rather than actually riding the thing.

    That’s preposterous!

    ianv
    Free Member

    0.35% faster……wow

    So if I go out for a 2 hr ride, I will get home 25 seconds faster.

    MoseyMTB
    Free Member

    I rode a 29’er, 650b and my 26’er back to back and I was equally as slow and unfit on all three.

    brakes
    Free Member

    I will get home 25 seconds faster

    [pillock mode]
    a 2hr ride is a 2hr ride.
    you will go further rather than get back quicker
    [/pillock mode]

    andyrm
    Free Member

    Factor that the Italian Enduro championship was won by Alex Lupato by only 1.3 seconds, and that 1 second is suddenly a very significant gap.

    Even at Enduro 1 at FOD the other weekend, less than 4 minutes seperated the top 75 riders, so incremental speed gains are really significant at the top of any Enduro race.

    chakaping
    Free Member

    Factor that the Italian Enduro championship was won by Alex Lupato by only 1.3 seconds, and that 1 second is suddenly a very significant gap.

    Can’t argue with that, but it doesn’t seem so significant when it might be the difference between 39th and 40th place.

    rewski
    Free Member

    what i said, but this bike is aimed at us, most pro riders already have a ride.

    fathomer
    Full Member

    andyrm – Member

    Factor that the Italian Enduro championship was won by Alex Lupato by only 1.3 seconds, and that 1 second is suddenly a very significant gap.

    But they’ll all be on 650b sometime soon, so, if it really was the wheels doing there ‘magic’ (and him not having an ever so slightly better run) the better wheels make absolutely no difference.

    Therefore 1 second to us mortals makes **** all difference!

    Edit: bike looks fantastic though, already been said but Lappy make great looking bikes.

    andyrm
    Free Member

    But they’ll all be on 650b sometime soon, so, if it really was the wheels doing there ‘magic’ (and him not having an ever so slightly better run) the better wheels make absolutely no difference.

    Therefore 1 second to us mortals makes **** all difference!

    But for those not lucky enough to have a sponsored ride, but who do compete, and like to gain every incremental increase possible, that’s got to be a good thing right?

    brakes
    Free Member

    no. they’re not of a good enough standard to ride consistently enough to realise the benefit.

    fathomer
    Full Member

    brakes – Member

    no. they’re not of a good enough standard to ride consistently enough to realise the benefit.

    This, they wouldn’t be winning anyway!

    AndreyE
    Free Member

    Well 🙂

    Even though this may cost me reputation of a normal person, to really prove this 1 second you’d need to do the following:

    – Measure a hell of a lot timings with the same rider, tyres, weather, and other factors on the same track, with 26 inch wheels.
    – Measure the same but with 650b wheels.

    Do a couple of statistical tests and then try to make any conclusions. Based on my experience proving 0.35% increase in speed may be very, very, veeeeery difficult 🙂 If possible at all 🙂

    BTW, while on this topic, why one can be sure that it’s the bigger wheels and not the totally new (from what I can see) carbon frame? 🙂

    Ahhh, analytics… 🙂 🙂

    chiefgrooveguru
    Full Member

    On my last ride I used Strava via my usual Garmin and also the iPhone app. I’m thrilled to announce that on most segments the iPhone ‘improved’ my times much more than 650b wheels improved Nico’s…

    tomhoward
    Full Member

    Well put my name down for one! This was always going to be my response, 26 or 650b…

    mojo5pro
    Free Member

    Proves nothing. He could do the same run on the same bike and vary by more than a second.

    maxtorque
    Full Member

    Lets hope they didn’t spend all their time being fixated in the new wheels and hence forget to design out all the existing flaws in the 2013 bikes………

    (like the silly cable routing that causes them to rub clean through the carbon frame, even when clipped exactly in place by the factory fixings)

    tomhoward
    Full Member

    Proves nothing. He could do the same run on the same bike and vary by more than a second.

    I imagine it will be the average of a number of runs on 26 compared to an average of a number of runs on 650b rather than 1 run on each…

    psling
    Free Member

    Does that mean he gets slower as the tyres wear?

    AndreyE
    Free Member

    I imagine it will be the average of a number of runs on 26 compared to an average of a number of runs on 650b rather than 1 run on each…

    This, plus you’d need to demonstrate that timing ranges within 26 inch mode runs and 650b inch mode runs are _less_ than this 1 second. Otherwise it proves nothing.

    For example:

    If in 26 inch mode it’s 151.3 – 151.7 seconds (most the runs are within this range) and for 650b inch mode most of the runs measure 150.1 – 150.9 seconds then there _might_ be a case of new bike being faster (and you don’t know if it’s wheels or frame or something else).

    If the timings range like 145-155 and 146-156 (and I believe they do) then even despite the fact that the averages are different by 1 sec, this difference cannot be deemed statistically significant – read: timing can be soooo different that 1 second is really nothing.

    And something tells me that the latter is the case. Gut feeling maybe 🙂

    davidtaylforth
    Free Member

    mojo5pro – Member
    Proves nothing. He could do the same run on the same bike and vary by more than a second.

    Judging by this thread, it proves some people appear to actually care about a 1 second difference (even if it was just a joke), and that they’re prepared to pay for it!

    Junkyard
    Free Member

    awesome science and i think you are right

    It is not a significant and i would imagine their is considerable overlap

    Perhaps even an outlier that skews the results die to say one really bad run or line choice

    Also he would learn about the course and get tired …how did they control for this

    And of course how as on two different bkes so hwo did the control for than not being the factor [ not just the wheel sixe it may have been geometry

    ahwiles
    Free Member

    [guessing]

    when nico says: ‘1second’

    he means: ‘chuff me sideways, it’s almost like cheating’

    or perhaps: ‘the difference is significant’

    [/guessing]

    chives
    Free Member

    I was conclusively faster riding 27″ wheels back in (struggles to remember but about 30 years ago). Clearly this had everything to do with wheel diameter and nothing to do with the fact that I was 30 years younger.. Oh FFS, If I had Nico’s ability on a bike I wouldn’t give a rats ass what wheel size I was riding, he clearly needs to get out more. 😉

    RamseyNeil
    Free Member

    Lapierre make really good looking bikes

    Some would say cracking 😆

    BadlyWiredDog
    Full Member

    So if I had 650B wheels and Nico had 26″ wheels I’d beat him by a second over a 2:50 sec run? That’s how I read it anyway and it sounds bloody awesome. I’ll be buying loads of them and sticking them on all my bikes tomorrow. Eat my dust, Stravanauts… 🙂

    mattjg
    Free Member

    The 2014 Lapierre Spicy has been revealed and Nico Vouilloz has shared his findings on the relative merits of 26in vs 650b wheels.

    Apparently the new bike is one second faster over a 2min 50sec run. Which I work out as around 0.35%.

    Link to source please.

    bartimaeus
    Free Member

    And maybe one day we’ll see a press release that says “this new bike is 1 second slower” or “this bike’s not quite as good” as the previous version. I believe they have a new bike to “sell” – and it looks good.

    Northwind
    Full Member

    mojo5pro – Member

    Proves nothing. He could do the same run on the same bike and vary by more than a second.

    Nico’s basically a bike-riding robot, his development testing is legendary. There was a wee interview a while back where he mentioned he’d got 2 axles, machined one of them down to make it less stiff, then done 2 days of shuttle runs to test them. 2 days! I trust it, personally, it is as good as a comparison as there will ever be.

    But… This isn’t the only thing he thinks/knows makes him faster. He’s a flex obsessive, like above, machining down factory parts to make them less stiff. He’s absolutely right IMO, but the point is that Lapierre have never taken his results on flex and sold a “15% less stiff” bike. They cherrypick what sells from his ideas and ignore what doesn’t. A little well engineered flex works really well on a bike, but stiffness is easy to sell.

    So what we have here isn’t “speed sells”, or a research led bike development programme, it’s “We want to sell a 650b bike. What do we have that we can sell it with”. Fact following form essentially. It’s like a Singletrack thread, decide what you think then google for evidence 😉

    It’s not unlike Fabien Barel with Mondraker… When Fabien says that fugly stems are great, you hear about it because Mondraker want to sell bikes with fugly stems. When Fabien says everyone runs their suspension too soft, and that we should be running less travel, far stiffer, and only using our suspension to provide grip… Mondraker sell softly damped bikes like everyone else, because soft suspension feels nice on test rides and in shops.

    b45her
    Free Member

    some one should tell dan atherton about this second because he chooses to race on a 26″ wheeled prototype rather than the new 650b force.

Viewing 40 posts - 1 through 40 (of 103 total)

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