I’m guessing that motorbike rider has seen bikes go down plenty of times and is competent enough to ride round it, the motorbike rider clearly slows waits for things to settle and moves on then all of a sudden the bike is moving again and he rides over it !
You might want to ask Steve Morabito about that…
maxtorque – Member
lets look at the science:
A world class roadie is going to be putting out something like 400w over the duration of the event (lets say 2hrs). To make a significant difference in performance you’d want at least a 50w (at the wheels) electric motor.
55w for 2 hrs (inc 10% powertransmission losses) is 110w/hrs, but you need your battery to be bigger than your energy requirement to keep the voltage high enough to allow the motor to keep making the power required. Typically, your battery is at least 60% bigger than your energy requirement, so we need, in this case around 200w/hrs.
Now, typical current Lipo batteries have an energy density of around 150whrs/kg, so we need a 1.25kg battery pack.
A 50W motor weighs around 500g, and we need a variable speed inverter to drive it (say 200g) and a gearbox to get the power to the rear wheel (or cranks or whatever) so that’s another 500g or so.
All up, we are looking at roughly 2.5kg extra mass, and of course, all parts/ wires etc have to be hidden in the frame invisibly.
So, why would the UCi need to Xray bikes to check for motors? They wouldn’t, a simple set of scales would immediately show the cheaters!!
Plus how many extra watts would the rider be using up just to push that extra 2.5kg?