Thought this would be a good time to give some updates on our resident rockstar Dotsie Bausch as she’s been doing some serious movin, shakin, and cyclin! The beginning of this month marked the last training camp in L.A. for Dotsie and the rest of the USA Cycling Olympic Track Team. From here they head overseas for the remainder of their training camps in the months leading up to 2012 Summer Olympics in London.
Last week was an exciting one for Dotsie with an incredibly successful trip to the San Diego Low Speed Wind Tunnel for a fun filled day of testing tons of positions, speed suits and much more for final output at the Olympics! The wind tunnel is somewhere racers go to find “free speed” which, when done properly can be outrageously effective. However finding this free speed is no easy task! The wind tunnel has to be approached with a well thought out plan with ideas and tweaks that can ultimately be applied to the real world (aka the track surface for Dots).
{Speed suit #1- look at those legs!}
{Speed suit #2- who knew your suit could make such a difference in performance!?}
The key components the engineers (that’s right, they have engineers there) at the wind tunnel look at are Drag and CDA aka Drag Coefficient. For those of you (like me) that this is a little foreign to- the drag is what happens when the wind hits you and the CDA is how the air flows over you. So to give you an idea of just how successful this effort was for Dotsie: upon entering the tunnel her CDA was .247. She left with a CDA of .202 which is an energy saving of almost 80 watts!
I’m no expert here but I’m thinking that’s the difference between silver and GOLD! Way to go Dots!
{The whole team at the San Diego Low Speed Wind Tunnel making this possible!}
