Bike Speed World Record

In 2000, Eric Barone was the first man to set forth from the legendary KL slope in Vars (alps), setting up a world record at a speed of 222.22 km/h. On March 28th, 2015 at 7:30 am, despite inauspicious weather conditions, Eric Barone beat his own World Speed record on bike, at 223,30 km/h!

A Cold and Windy Day for A World Record

At 7:30 am, from the top of the famous KL slope of Vars named “Chabrieres”, Eric Barone sets forth. Gusts of wind make it hard to keep the bike in its departure position. Windchill hits -20°c on this Saturday morning when Eric Barone takes the track against a blowing wind.

Needless to say, the weather conditions were far from being ideal, but Eric successfully rode his bike and kept it rolling all the way down. During the last 500 m, Eric managed to balance his trajectory, making the most of his powerful, tailor-made bike, and broke his own speed world record: 223.30 km/h.

With more than twenty years of experience in project steering and research in the extreme sports industry (high speed sailing, mountain bike, motor sports, etc), ENGINOVA played a major role in this achievement by mixing a prototype and a standard bike.

In order to reach the highest speed, the design of the bike skeleton was based on aeronautic theories by gathering engineering calculations, realizing carbon fairings, and performing tests in a wind tunnel. The slope has been optimized too for obtaining a straight path.

Ellipse-N Used To Position the Official Chronometer Cells

On this kind of world record attempt, the main difficulty is to calculate the position, along the full track, where the highest speed will be achieved by Eric, without having made any run from the top of the slope. This key point was solved by using the Ellipse-N.

The Ellipse-N is a miniature inertial navigation system with embedded GNSS receiver. Mounted on the bike, the Ellipse-N delivered the full behavior of the machine at lower speeds (180 kph starting at half of the track).

The results were used to compare and tune the speed simulator software. From these “low speed” recordings, ENGINOVA engineers were able to extrapolate where the highest speed should be achieved, in order to position the official chronometer cells (100 m between the 2 cells).