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I Feel the Need, Oh boy was I hooked. Something as simple as wheel fairings, or as exotic as a full body fairing and suddenly you’re going at speeds normally attained only by the elite 10%. This was definitely for me. Add on top of all this the fact that just about anyone with even limited finances can come up with fairings capable of boosting speeds by 20% and you have a formula that says “Let’s go racing!” I started racing in our Midwest HPV Racing Series soon thereafter, and have never had so much fun (legal fun, that is) since. Fast forward to 1984. Most everyone knows that a key ingredient in technical development is money. Top speeds for fully faired recumbents seemed to have stagnated in the mid fifty mph range. Keep in mind that the top speed record for a “conventional” bike was about ten mph less. Can we go any faster? Most racers involved think the answer is yes, but there seems to be very little progress toward higher speeds. Enter the E.I. DuPont Corporation with that universal lubricant, cold hard cash! The first single rider HPV to run 65 miles per hour through a distance of 200 meters in essentially flat and wind free conditions wins the prize of $15,000. Do you remember those days? Ideas started popping and top speed records were dropping like flies. And just like in auto racing, lots of good ideas were trickling down to the rest of the cycling community. Just where do you think the designs for the Olympic “funny bikes” came from? As a direct result of the ideas generated from competition for the DuPont Prize, I can get on a stock recumbent with a good lightweight fairing and push it up to 42+ mph. I’m 44 years old this year, and not by any stretch of imagination to be considered Olympic calibre biking material. All because someone invested a mere (by big corporate measures) $15,000! After only two years of intense development, the DuPont Prize was won by the Easy Racer Team at 65.484 miles per hour. Everybody cheered, everybody went home, everybody told their non-biking friends about the fantastic things that recumbents could do! Unfortunately, nothing much has happened in the ten years since the DuPont Prize fell. The Team Cheetah group boosted the record speed by about three mph, but how many people know about it and how many even care? In the ten years since, how many genuinely new ideas have come into the biking community? Not many, if any. It is my intention to change all that. Introducing the Hill deciMach Prize. Simple. Just get on your HPV and pump it up to 75 miles per hour. For 200 meters. With level and windfree conditions. One tenth the speed of sound!! Why? For $18,000 minimum is why. As of 2004 the prize is up to nearly $24,000. The deciMach was announced at the IHPVA Speed Championships in Las Vegas this year (1998?). The initial announcement was to stir up two things. First is sponsorship money. The rules committee will be made up of sponsors with a simple voting formula for creating the prize rules: One vote per $1,000 of sponsorship for the prize. So far we have the following sponsors:
What does $1,000 get you besides fame, glory, and a warm fuzzy feeling? You get to help formulate the rules for this event, and maybe a free set of Ginsu Knives (most useful for cutting Kevlar and other advanced composites). Don’t have a spare grand just lying around? No problem! Set up your own mini-syndicate where your group scrapes together the cash and elects a representative to our rules committee. It’s been done already by Indiana and is being considered by a few other groups. The second goal of the announcement was to simply get people thinking. I’ve asked anyone with ideas about the prize (both what you would like to see happen and what you would like to see avoided) to drop me a line. You don’t have to put money into the prize to submit ideas. Remember, advice is still free. Although I have heard that Washington is considering a new tax on free advice. In closing, let me list some of the initial points and ideas we have had so far:
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