RALTech | How Much Improvement?

It is interesting to consider the margins of improvement which are necessary to make a significant difference to a race result. Often a much smaller difference separates us from our target than we imagine.

If we assume a '25' takes 55 minutes as a starting point, this is 3300 seconds. A 10-second improvement would be considered quite significant and could easily be the difference between 1st and 2nd place, yet this represents only 0.3% of the total time. This is beyond the ability of most current systems to detect; power meters generally claim around ±1% and wind tunnels can struggle to resolve even to that accuracy. A certain amount of faith is therefore required to believe that a small change which can't properly be measured will provide an improvement in your final result. Essentially, the time-trial is the most accurate measure available - and is it not also the most important?

As an example, let's look at the 2009 National '25':-
There were 9 instances of identical times, 19 competitors within 1 second of the rider in front and a maximum of 6 places could have been gained by 10-second improvement. On average, there was 4.55 seconds between each place over the highly-contested range of 11th-30th place.

All of this shows that time gains in single digits can have a significant effect on placings. My own experience is of three occasions in one season where I tied for first place. A gain of 0.5 seconds (0.015%) could have secured the outright win.