Monday, February 11, 2008

Jani Brajkovic At The SD Wind Tunnel


- by Jani Brajkovic

Greetings, all - Gusev, Andrey Mizurov and I arrived in San Diego Thursday evening for some important TT testing while our teammate Chris Horner would come in to meet us the next day. We met Steve Hed and Dino at the hotel and had our schedules set for Friday in the low speed wind tunnel at the San Diego Air and Space Museum.

I was the first to be tuned by speed specialist Hed and his team at 8AM. After a few shots taken by photographer Dave Wrolstad it was time to get down to some serious work.

After a few runs Steve and company managed to fine-tune my position, resulting in a savings of one minute in a 50km time trial! We lowered my position by 1.5cm and made my elbows sit in very close to the body, making me in a very narrow position. It was amazing to see how much less drag I produced with that position! The only thing we need to test now is to see if I can actually produce the same power output. We will test that soon.

Next up was Gusev. Again the experts in the wind tunnel managed to solve some aerodynamic issues right away for Gusev. He actually gained a massive 150 seconds over previous testing in 2006! Next was Horner and then Mizurov and again we saw big improvements through working with Steve.

At the end of the day we were all pretty tired but extremely happy and thankful to Steve Hed and his team who did an amazing job with us once again. It was just awesome to see him and listen to his ideas and watch the results of his work as drag numbers dropped from one run to another.

Thanks again to the San Diego wind tunnel team, Steve Hed and company for an amazing experience!

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