Over three Olympics, the athletes McLaren worked with won 17 gold medals, and 32 medals in all. McLaren couldn’t take all the credit—these were sports in which Britain had done well before, and its pursuit cycling team has dominated the event for a decade—but it was an auspicious place to begin diversifying from cars. As it grew toward its current head count of 250, MAT hired engineers and designers of its own, many from outside the racing world. Another early client was Specialized. The Northern California bicycle maker had long claimed that “smoother is faster,” meaning that the ability of its high-performance road and mountain bikes to absorb bumps not only made them more comfortable to ride but also quicker than the competition. Smoother, however, isn’t always faster: A too-flexible bike steals power from the rider’s pedaling. So how smooth was too smooth? The testing methods that even industry-leading bikemakers like Specialized used—putting people on prototypes to ride them and report back—were highly subjective and of limited use.
Hired in early 2010, the MAT team decided to build a bicycle version of its race car simulator. They quickly realized that the project raised its own set of challenges. Unlike in a car, the rider’s body was a major part of the calculation. “The human’s a big, fat, blobby mass on a very stiff, light structure,” says Duncan Bradley, the engineer and product designer who led the team. To work, the simulator had to re-
For three years, the McLaren team gathered data on how different parts of different Specialized bikes performed, individually and in combination, with and without the rider. A serious cyclist himself, Bradley often served as the test rider, perching in spandex and helmet on a deconstructed bit of bicycle mounted on hydraulics. The rig would send calibrated jolts up the handlebars or the seat, into his hands or hindquarters, with sensors measuring the diffusion of force. It was slow work, but by mid-2013 the team succeeded in creating, essentially, a virtual bicycle: “We turned the whole system, including the rider, into a mathematical formula,” says Bradley. Now Specialized’s designers and engineers could, with a few keystrokes, change the shape or weight or stiffness of various parts, and try out the resulting bike over different road surfaces.
“We’d been taking the measurements that were used to build this model for years, but we could not put it together,” says Mark Cote, Specialized’s manager for aerodynamics research and development. “There’s a kind of analysis paralysis in the world today, with every single piece of your world being measured in some way.” McLaren, he says, laughing, “has way too many sensors on their cars, and they know how and when to interpret that data.”