This article was taken from the August 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
In 2011, McLaren Applied Technologies (MAT) first collaborated with California-based Specialized to create the world's fastest road bicycle, the Venge.
Now McLaren is building its successor. This time, though, everything will be designed in a virtual world. "What we do now is try to understand how the surface, bike and rider interact -- then model this," says MAT managing director Geoff McGrath.
Duncan Bradley, head of high-performance design, explains that a man-machine system, such as someone riding a high-performance bike, can be defined by hundreds of parameters, creating a mathematical model that describes the vehicle dynamics of the system in motion. "The neat thing about this approach is once we have a simulation model in place we can start to analyse the impact of design changes or innovations on parts of the system that are almost impossible to measure in the real world, such as the dynamic influences of the human body," he says. Simulations also include rider aerodynamics and riding position.
Of course, to do all this in a virtual world you need a state-of-the-art simulator, like that used in F1, in which a car's sensors collect thousands of data points a second. This machine allows them to perfect their set-up without ever touching the physical car. "People tend to design things by eye or by experience," says McGrath. "We thought, why don't you first instrument the product by building a model of how it behaves in real conditions and then creating a simulated world, so you can fine-tune the designs without the massive expense of building and racing it?"
The next version will be even smarter, reckons McGrath: "We aim to produce a bike that has intelligence built in, so that it can monitor the way it's being used and use the data it captures to allow the user to adapt the set-up. Where we're going is a 'bike with a brain'."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
