Recumbent and hills?

DIscuss anything relating to non-standard cycles and their equipment.
Blondie
Posts: 322
Joined: 23 May 2021, 5:11pm

Re: Recumbent and hills?

Post by Blondie »

Most of this comes down to relative fitness. On my recumbent I’ve overtaken riders on uprights on hills. The opposite has also happened. Most upright riders are embarrassed about being overtaken by a recumbent rider on a hill. You’ll rarely hear them admit to it.
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[XAP]Bob
Posts: 20307
Joined: 26 Sep 2008, 4:12pm

Re: Recumbent and hills?

Post by [XAP]Bob »

Having just fixed up the idlers on my cheetah...

My longer loop time between that and my velo are very close, my shorter loop strongly favours the velo (less elevation change).
Whilst my flat and downhill are easily faster on the velo, the cheetah does better uphill... And that difference is greater than just the weight difference would suggest.

Whilst it's an unfair comparison (for fitness reasons) my rapto was substantially faster still.

The biggest difference uphill is the power that the vehicles "encourage" me to put in, the rapto and the cheetah just want more power.
The biggest difference on the flat is aero, and the velo just smokes everything else in that regard.
A shortcut has to be a challenge, otherwise it would just be the way. No situation is so dire that panic cannot make it worse.
There are two kinds of people in this world: those can extrapolate from incomplete data.
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