Canadian engineering team, AeroVelo, shatters human-powered speed record with “Eta” bike

If a season of Canadian cyclists turning in breathtaking, medal-winning performances wasn’t enough to convince the world that there’s something that makes our country’s riders really, really fast, the events of late last week on Battle Mountain, Nevada probably did the trick.

Of course, this time, science might have had more to do with it than anything else.

On Thursday, Sept. 17, a team of engineers from the University of Toronto and their captain, Dr. Todd Reichert, took to the deserts of Battle Mountain with an oddly egg-shaped bike. It’s a familiar-looking machine to those who have followed the World Human Powered Speed Challenge in past years, though. For sixteen years running, the competition pits speed bikes like Reichert’s, designed by the world’s top engineers, against one another in a series of almost impossibly fast time trials.

The contest: to see who can become the fastest rider — or, to use the competition’s lingo, human-powered vehicle operator — alive.

Reichert’s Ontario-based team, AeroVelo, called their bike, a recumbent speed bike encased in that egg-shaped aerodynamic capsule, “Eta” — a reference to the seventh letter of the Greek alphabet, denoting efficiency when used as a lower-case symbol. Constructed from an ultra-light carbon frame, the shell was made with a carbon-honeycomb sandwich design, which reportedly reduced the bike’s drag to 100 times less than that experienced by a car. In keeping with recumbent bike design, Reichert’s riding position inside found him on his bike, his legs fully extended in front of him to pedal. Encased entirely in the shell, seeing forward wasn’t a matter of seeing over handlebars, though. A camera feeding the forward view through an interior monitor would serve as the Toronto-based scientist’s eyes.

ETA keeps getting faster. We have set a new record tonight with 86.5mph/139.2kph. We just need a little more to break the 140 line! #whpsc

— AeroVelo (@AeroVelo) September 19, 2015

When the team rolled out on the WHPSC’s fourth day of competition, the overall result of their work and research was a bike that looks as much like the escape pod of a spacecraft as a human-powered vehicle. And with Reichert’s athletic prowess balancing his work in mechanical engineering — the U of T-based scientist was previously a national speed skater — the combination of human pilot and machine, in this case, would prove seemingly unstoppable.

Eta hit the five-mile stretch of road early in that morning, building up to peak velocity before hitting a 200-metre speed trap. There, Reichert’s recumbent pedaling sliced Eta through the air, building towards a top speed of 137.93 kph, covering the 200-metre stretch in just 5.22 seconds. On September 18, Eta followed up that first Thursday ride by breaking its own record, clocking a speed of 139.2 kph. Two days later, a speed of 139.46 kph raised that bar even higher.

Each recorded speed shattered the previous record set in 2013: 133.8 kph.

Another record breaking run tonight for team ETA at 139.46 kph. #whpsc

— AeroVelo (@AeroVelo) September 20, 2015

Eta, of course, was designed to top speeds in excess of 140 kph, the team said. But the record-breaking speedbike is also only the latest in a fleet of human-powered vehicles designed and built by AeroVelo, several of which have represented huge leaps forward in engineering. Back in 2010, AeroVelo constructed and flew the world’s first human-powered ornithopter, which they called Snowbird. Three years later, AeroVelo turned heads during competition for the Sikorsky prize, by way of its Atlas human-powered helicopter.

2011, too, saw the team raise the bar in terms of ultra-fast bikes. That year, their Vortex bicycle hit 116.9 kph — a land speed record for college-built and college-piloted vehicles.