The French Olympic cycling team had a very poor participation in the last London Olympics held in 2012. Due precisely to this, in addition to making its components train much harder, they have sought to develop their bicycles as much as possible to make them , within the regulations, a lot more aerodynamic which, in turn, would help further improve the performance of your riders.
With this idea in mind, the Olympic team leaders contacted companies such as PSA, Renault and Cnam, which jointly own a wind tunnel, to help them with the tests to create a series of components that would improve penetration. aerodynamics of its riders. Thanks to this joint work, it has been achieved develop a revolutionary handlebar adapted to each rider.
French Olympic cycling team adds revolutionary handlebars to their bikes
According to statements made by Marc pajon, responsible for the wind tunnel:
After a year of testing riders' clothing, helmets, bikes and even postures to find the best formula to reduce resistance while developing the energy capacity of athletes, we realized that the handlebar it had not been improved. With our design, the air passes into the rider's arm, is evacuated and thus does not create turbulence that would slow down the runner.
To create this revolutionary handlebar, as with vehicle development, they have been performed successive interactions so that, once you have a prototype created in clay, it is tested in a wind tunnel, scanned in 3D, studied by numerical simulation and modified to generate minimum resistance before returning to the wind tunnel again.
Once you have the final piece, baptized as Jet OneThis was sent to the Val d'Oisienne Erpro & Sprint company to be manufactured by 3D printing by melting aluminum powder. In this unique way it has been achieved that each cyclist of the French Olympic team can have a handlebar adapted to your personal characteristics. Thanks to this development, according to the Federation, cyclists will be able to win several hundredths of a second, something of extreme importance if one takes into account that some championships have been decided at the velodrome by mere thousandths.