Mark McM |
07-12-2020 07:05 PM |
Quote:
Originally Posted by vincenz
(Post 2756482)
More clickbait. People will do anything for views won’t they?
Too bad you can’t measure comfort solely by a number. That’s like if you were to quantify the comfort of a shirt by measuring only how stretchy it is. Will that single number really tell you how comfortable any shirt is? There are differences in different materials that cannot be captured by a number.
It’s obvious the guy does not ride race frames. Build up a steel race frame and then an aluminum frame or carbon frame, with the exact same parts, with skinnier tires, then get report back. If you can’t discern any difference at all, then I don’t know what to say.
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Why is it obvious that the guy does not ride race frames? It's been found that people who ride race frames (including those who do it for a living) have difficulty in distinguishing "comfort" between frames.
It is true that you can't measure "comfort" directly with a scientific instrument. To determine differences in human sensations, you need humans. But human's are easily influenced by pre-conception and bias. (For example, tests have found that when people see a wine being poured from a fancy bottle, they find it tastes better than the exact same wine when they see it being poured from a less fancy bottle). To get around that, blind (and sometimes double blind) test protocols have been developed. So what happens when you subject riders to blind tests of bicycle frames? That's been done a few times - and when it has been done, the riders weren't very good at distinguishing differences in comfort between frames. In this interview with Josh Poertner (one of the engineers at Zipp who has worked with many racing teams), he describes doing blind tests with industry professionals:
Quote:
I've participated in numerous blind product studies over the years where we controlled bikes or the wheels (I've done this twice with a bike manufacturer during development work around a pro team, and many times with wheels) with fabric shield tensioned between seat post and stem, flat black rattle can paint on everything, etc. In each of these studies, the entire subject group including pro riders, engineers, and other industry people with LOTS of experience, struggled to find any real differences between any of the bikes, until after the study was de-blinded and everybody (including me) instantly began to try and rationalize it all… This is just human nature, we all do it, and from experience, it is nearly impossible NOT to do it.
One of the major discoveries was that after controlling for seat post (round post shimmed into aero frame so as to not give it away) not a single rider found the aero road bike to be less comfortable, less compliant, etc, than the identically setup 'endurance' or 'roubaix' bike (clearly this leaves room for the aero seat post to be why people feel aero bikes are less compliant..seatposts generally have more effect on bike compliance in the lab than frames do, but that's another story).
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So, if pro racers can't feel the difference in comfort between an aero road frame and an endurance road frame, why do you think you can?
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