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Motor doping thread

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Mar 11, 2009
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Bolder said:
dolophonic said:
Today Paris Nice day 1 - in the crash a few kms from the finish a bunch of riders went down.

The Katusha riders bike back wheel was really spinning .. took out another rider and kept on spinning ..looked very unusual ..

Yes! We now have incontrovertible proof. :rolleyes:


:lol: that is not what i was saying .. i just thought it looked a little sus...
 
Here's the rear hub of that riders wheel in the video above.

cognition_cutaway.png


Absolutely no way you could do or would want to retro-fit any form of usable motor into the small void available within the hub shell. Maybe a couple of watts, but think how small the rotor and stator would have to be to be self-contained in what is essentially no more than 5mm gap around the axle which would still have to be there to withstand the forces going through the bearings anyway.

Now lets look at Katusha riders frame and Zipp rims of his Canyon Aeroroad CF SLX and see if you could get a usable motor in there to spin a wheel round.

2018-Katusha%E2%80%93Alpecin-Canyon-Aeroad-CF-SLX-Team-Bike-Tiago-Machado-13.jpg


The Rotor (alternating polarity magnets) part of the motor has to be in the rim of the Zipp Firecrest 404s he's riding. The Stator (Coils) of the motor has to be within the seat stay and chain stay VERY close to the Rotor magnets when the wheel is turning. Anything more than 1-2mm gap between rotor and stator is incredibly inefficient because the force of permanent magnets exponentially falls very rapidly when not close to one another. For every 1mm of gap about 20% of the usable force of the motor is lost.
FOSHOCLHAQ2UXKE.LARGE.jpg


So Lets look at the gap between stays and rim on Katusha's Aeroroad CLX.

20150403-20150403-DSC_8877.jpg


There's about a 25mm distance between where the stator could be in the seat stay and where the rotor magnet will pass it inside the Firecrest rim, so essentially ZERO usable magnetic force from the seat stays possible using the chart above. Obviously you could use stronger, much heavier magnets, but even so incredible heavy then for the wheel and inefficient still anyway.

Looking at the chain stays of the CLX

TrofimovBB-1020x680.jpg


You could argue they might be around 10mm from the rim, so a very slight usable magnetic force there, but tiny in reality still. There's only two chain stays and maybe 3cm of space to fit the stator into where it would align with the magnets in the rim. As Varjas explained, this type of wheel is not considered a motor like a crank-based one, he classes them as boosters because the wheel is really only being propelled from one stator in the stays not around the whole circumference you really require for any usable power.

Here is what a usable rim and frame-based motor looks like in the real world. Notice how the magnets all have to be glued visible to outside of rim to maintain the 1mm gap (even inside the rim you've already increased the gap by 1mm and lost 20% efficiency by doing so). Notice how the seat tube and stays are wrapped around nearly 90 degrees of the wheel to so the stators are working more efficiently with the magnets, not just the 5 degrees available in a typical off-the-shelf frame like the Canyon.

Lightweight_Velocite_Project_eBike_pedelec_concept_bike_driveside_rear_wheel_motor.jpg


You could argue you might squeeze a couple of usable watts into a typical Zipp rear hub within the couple of cm3 available and a couple of watts in Canyon Aeroroad chainstay given how inefficient it would have to be due, but even that is extremely difficult to do invisibly in the space involved to a simple tablet the UCI uses to detect motors. If you're protecting the magnets from magnetic field detector, you're by default also protecting them from being able to interact with the stator which needs that magnetic field to work off or going down using coils instead of magnets in the rotor, but then you've got the issue how to power the coils wirelessly and that presents a whole new challenge in itself.
 
http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/fre...r-sentenced-to-60-hours-of-community-service/
Cyril Fontayne, the 43-year-old French amateur cyclist who was caught using a hidden motor during a race last October, has been found guilty of attempted fraud and sentenced to 60 hours of community service by a court in Périgueux.

Fontayne's motor doping was discovered on October 1 in a race for veterans and juniors with a field of just 16 riders. He had been targeted by the AFLD after arousing the suspicions of his fellow competitors in the weeks prior to the race.

He reportedly bought the rudimentary downtube motor from a French website and fitted it to a frame bought online from China. He suggested that the French site sells between twenty and thirty motors a month. Fontayne said that he had started using the motor after suffering with a herniated disc earlier in 2017.
 
I can't see any justification for this case to go to court - Here we have an amateur racing for 100 Euro's or similar who uses a motor to try to win a weekend ride - Just throw him out of the race and ban him from cycling - It's sad that the UCI and the French legal system are wasting resources.
 
dolophonic said:
I think anyone watches this GIF and immediately deduces that a motor was involved hasn't ridden much. Or hasn't crashed much, which is the same thing. Provided the crash is sufficiently injury-threatening, at some point Body Alarm Response commandeers higher brain function and reasoning ability is all but switched off. You forget about the nuances required for unclipping and begin snatching at the pedals willynilly with all the force that your adrenaline-fueled glutes can muster in the effort to free up a foot to use as an outrigger so you can arrest the fall. If at some point in that crash sequence the rear wheel loses contact with tarmac at the same time as your supercharged glutes are firing, it imparts the most ferocious spin on the rear wheel. I've personally seen it dozens of times, sometimes even when the rider was using platform pedals. In fact the most common sounds in the immediate aftermath of a crash involving multiple riders are the clatter of freewheels followed by cries of pain.

If it's still spinning like this 20 minutes on, then that counts as suspicious. But what's seen in this brief video? Not at all. Nothing to see here. Move along now.
 
dolophonic said:
Today Paris Nice day 1 - in the crash a few kms from the finish a bunch of riders went down.

The Katusha riders bike back wheel was really spinning .. took out another rider and kept on spinning ..looked very unusual ..
The "suspicion" of every spinning wheel has to have an end, no? No offense to you personally, but there is nothing suspicious/unusual about that clip. Maybe that bike has a magic motor, but this clip doesn't indicate, let alone prove, that.
 
According to Reuters, the UCI will deploy x-ray trucks to stop Froome, I mean detect motor doping :cool:

X-ray equipped trucks will be used to detect riders secretly add motors to their bikes in big races like the Tour de France.

The X-ray cameras will check bikes after stages of the Tour de France, the Giro d'Italia, the Vuelta and the five biggest one-day races.
 
Re:

Wiggo's Package said:
Feck, the Dawg's options are narrowing

Instructions to Morgan, find more reasons to string the AAF dude

No more iPad Candy Crush high scores for Froome. He’ll have to face the UCI x-ray truck! Not sure how the X-ray truck will stop Froome and his 58 wheel changes per stage but all will be unveiled tomorrow! :Neutral:
 
Jul 16, 2010
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thehog said:
According to Reuters, the UCI will deploy x-ray trucks to stop Froome, I mean detect motor doping :cool:

X-ray equipped trucks will be used to detect riders secretly add motors to their bikes in big races like the Tour de France.

The X-ray cameras will check bikes after stages of the Tour de France, the Giro d'Italia, the Vuelta and the five biggest one-day races.

This will hurt Froome and Valverde I think.
 
Jul 5, 2009
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Well this is super unimpressive.

We already know that the iPads are useless, so there's no need to keep using them. And the x-ray machine is a boondoggle. Let's say there's 200 riders at a race and 100 spare bikes. If it takes 1 minute to set up and scan a bike, that's 300 minutes of work! I really doubt a tech is going to scan bikes for five hours non-stop before a race. The cost would be outrageous. So only a few bikes will get scanned at select races. Useless.

John Swanson