Recumbents come in a huge variety of styles, weights, comfort levels and prices.
There is something for everybody.
The question is, which one is right for you?
That depends on:
Honza Galla and Matt Galat discuss their preferences
Adam has plans on increasing the Australian land speed record from 75 miles per hour to the next mile per hour hat of 80.
This will put him in the top 10 fastest human ever and the fastest person ever to build and race their own bike without sponsorship.
Adam’s bike was flown over to America last year and has stayed there in storage at the big chief motel for the past year. This means no shipping fee this year and allows him to continue his racing career year to year.
He has improvements planned to be made to his streamliner before this year’s event that will squeeze some extra watts of efficiency and hopefully be enough to get him over the 80mph barrier.
The first is a more reliable battery system for the camera and electronics. Previously individual 18650 lithium cells were joined together to create a larger capacity bank of 12volts.
These were time consuming to charge and at risk of failure. If one failed the entire system would fail. These will be replaced with Milwaukee 12v 5ah battery banks. Off the shelf item means fast charging and extremely easy to source replacement parts if needed.
The second is a new set of wheels.
The wheels used in 2024 were built when Adam was first learning to use carbon fibre and composite materials. This meant the wheels were over engineered and weigh 4.5kg each. The surface finish on the front wheel is also not ideal for optimal efficiency inside the wheel fairing.
The new wheels being built will be designed using years of experience Adam has gained.
They will save a whopping 2kg per wheel in weight. This 4kg saving should make acceleration easier not only because there is less weight to accelerate but also because there is far less rotational mass to accelerate.
Finally, Adam is looking into improving the efficiency of rolling resistance. See the link to a video trisled recently did showing the difference inner tubes can make to rolling resistance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMCRKP_h9wg
In 2024 adam used butyl rubber inner tubes. This year he plans to swap them out with tpu inner tubes and hopefully find a faster make of tyre to go with that. Even only a few watts of saving can mean a big difference to top speed when 300watts get the streamliner to over 75mph/121kmh.
Other minor improvements include more thorough taping of the fairing seam and installing a plastic sheet to separate the brake discs from the cockpit to limit any harmful smoke produced during braking entering his lungs.
Other teams planning to attend this year are Russell Bridge with the team 77 hoping to break the British record of 77mph and the French university Annecy with rider Francois Pervis who is aiming to break the overall land speed record of 89mph.
OzHPV have just received confirmation from WHPVA that they have ratified all records at the recent Lang-Lang event! The records have already been posted to their website:
Competition Records – World Human Powered Vehicle Association
Congratulations to the riders and their new distance records!
OzHPV will be working to update its record list on our website.
We note that it is now out of date with records set in the last 18months not shown and apologise to the people affected.