Hairpins Not Hairshorts

Two and a half years ago, four engineers with backgrounds in road racing sat around a table talking about how to become professional cyclists. One had been cut from Team Great Britain’s development program years earlier, but all were equipped with academic ideas about how to train smarter and go faster using theories from school. With a little luck, they’d compete at a track nationals, maybe even qualify for a World Cup event.

Armed with an unconventional approach to bike fitting, kit and training, Charlie Tanfield, Jacob Tipper, Dan Bigham and Jonathan Wale - four unknown talents from Derby, UK - started racing under the name Team KGF. With their first nationals approaching, the guys were confident in the performance analysis they’d done themselves, acting very much as outsiders in an insular sport. Other than Tanfield, Tipper, Bigham and Wale, few people anticipated the result.

“We broke the competition record, won the team pursuit and beat the national team,” recalls Bigham, an engineer by training who used to work for the Mercedes Formula 1 team in the aerodynamics department. “I mean, it was pretty outrageous to rock up to our first nationals and have so much success. After that, we figured why not see where this could go?”

Cap in hand, the team pushed on, creatively sourcing enough money to enter their first UCI World Cup event in Poland (November 3-5, 2017). Lightning didn’t strike as it had at home. “We didn’t really maximize our potential in Poland,” recalls Bigham by interview over the phone. “We were not yet able to compete at that level.”

The experience was an eye-opener. The cycling world got very curious about how four athletes, untrained by traditional program standards, could come at track cycling so differently and with so much success. Like Billy Beane did for baseball’s Oakland A’s, they showed that much of the conventional wisdom that then dominated track racing was dated.

More funding ensured, followed by some World Cup success. “Pretty awesome for a bunch of mates just winging it,” adds Bigham. Now embracing the moniker of underdogs, the team wasn’t done. Their application of engineering to track cycling’s biggest stages had only just started.

A tsunami of press coverage followed Team KGF’s flop in Poland. Rider Charlie Tanfield took first in the Individual Pursuit event at the January 2018 World Cup event in Belarus; the Team won the Team Pursuit at the same event. They continued on, honing their version of progress. Several of the riders competed at the World Championships in the Netherlands in March, others competed at the Commonwealth Games in Australia later in April; at the event, Tanfield won gold in the 4000m Individual Pursuit.

As the world watched Team KGF cement themselves as contenders, Argon18’s incubator business, Notio, was also finding its footing in the cycling world. Their personal aero - meter - the Notio - was being used by Astana Pro Team, enabling them to make data-driven decisions in real road conditions (optimizing pull times, keeping the team together, maximizing speed and power) ahead of that year’s Tour de France. Ed Collins, who had recently joined the company to help market the Notio device, got in touch with Bigham to see if Team KGF might be interested in similarly maximizing their aerodynamic efficiency in a measurable way.

“Obviously I’d heard about the device all over the place, as we all followed the space with a lot of interest. But when Ed reached out with a message for coffee, it was exciting to see what we could do together,” recalls Bigham. “A lot of teams have the capability to measure and apply data analysis, but few are actually doing it. We jumped on the opportunity.”

Team pursuit analysis has a lot of potential to help track teams ride faster. Acceleration, role angles, coefficient of aerodynamic drag - all these variables (and more) can be measured in training using a device like the Notio.

Bigham left that first meeting with Collins with a device in hand; soon after everyone on Team KGF started training with one attached their bike. Bigham took on the role of digesting the Notio outputs on team performance. The first test after they started training smarter came later in October 2018 at the World Cup event in Paris.

“One of our strongest riders wasn’t performing to the level he should have been,” says Bigham about the Team’s initial performance in France. They got to the next event in Milton, Ontario, early, and hit the track, Notio’s mounted, and started aero testing ahead of race day. The data helped quell any internal anxieties expressed toward change. They qualified first and narrowly missed out on a gold medal, altering skin suits, extensions and stack height - last minute changes that were confirmed by definitive data.

With sponsor interest and a rebrand to Huub Wattbike in 2019 - now an Independent British UCI track team - Bigham and team continue to use the Notio to measure air speed during all training sessions, splitting data out by half laps looking for improvements. There’s no questioning their ambition to go faster, internally or outside the team, and with an eye toward breaking three world records in Mexico (June 2019) (the Team Pursuit, Individual Pursuit and the Hour Record events), what was once looked at as a radical approach to training for the track is now considered pragmatic by other teams.

“We are constantly making gains, whether that’s equipment, strategy, or clothing, all because we can be so definitive with our analysis,” explains Bigham. “We went from obscurity in two years to winning World Cups. We can keep pushing the boundaries forward without any limitation, all in the space of a day.”

This article was originally written as a result of project with Notio and conversation with Team KGF lead engineer and rider, Dan Bigham. Check out the Notio if you haven’t already - - a device that could transform aerodynamics in just about every discipline in cycling.