July 1, 2004

Tour de Technologie

Here's a fascinating story about the technology and data-sifting that goes into developing the bikes Lance Armstrong rides in the Tour de France.

Saving the 32-year-old Armstrong as little as 10 watts of energy over the course of a 120-mile stage of the Tour will speed his trip by one minute. Not much? Last year, in his record-tying fifth Tour win, he edged German rival Jan Ullrich by 61 seconds after 2,125 miles of racing.

... This is where the 5,000-ride database of the Trek Bicycle Corp. comes into play. Using a combination of three-dimensional modeling software from Alias, once a unit of hardware maker Silicon Graphics; mechanical design software from SolidWorks; and low-cost, high-performance personal computers running Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices, senior industrial designer Michael Sagan and a project team of 12 worked from December 2002 to April 2003 to simultaneously design bikes that would give Armstrong an edge in two consecutive Tours. The first, which became the basis of Trek's Madone line of bikes, was Armstrong's "daily drive" in the race pack, a.k.a. peloton. A second is to be his secret weapon in this year's Tour, a version of the Madone called the SSL that is specially designed to race uphill.