In search of speed

Koen de Kort leads Lidl-Trek’s quest to find the fastest race clothing with technical partner Santini

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Riding faster without having to push more watts sounds ideal, but as we chase more and more material advantages they become harder to find. Of course, we’re used to creating aerodynamic bikes, testing helmets that can save a handful of watts, and spending hours to find the ideal body position to cut through the wind. But, on top of this we’ve been working with our technical partner Santini, sponsor of the iconic yellow jersey, to develop the fastest skinsuit possible. Spoiler alert: it’s not just about fitting skin-tight!

Koen de Kort, team support manager of Lidl-Trek (©SeanHardy)

Lidl-Trek’s Team Support Manager Koen de Kort and Trek Bikes’ aerodynamicist Anthony Munson have put their heads together, alongside long-time Team partner Santini, and landed on the idea to employ different fabrics in different positions on the riders’ bodies. They had plenty of theories, but before Santini could fire up their sewing machines, they needed to do plenty of testing.

The first step was testing a range of fabrics, supplied by Santini, on a basic cylindrical shape inside a small wind tunnel to see how the air flow would react to each fabric. With this data they could learn which fabrics provided the fastest results in different areas of the body. However, even with this wind tunnel testing, it’s still not comparable to a real-life situation.

Tao Geoghegan Hart during the wind tunnel test, March 2024 (©SeanHardy)

(©SeanHardy)

“We also tested a lot in turbulent circumstances,” explained Koen de Kort, “because that’s what we’re faced with in real life, whereas most wind tunnel tests have quite laminar (uniform) airflow. However, outside that isn’t the case. We wanted to make sure that the testing that we did was more similar to outside conditions.”

Starting with five riders, Koen and his team of experts returned to the wind tunnel with a variety of time trial suits and road suits made from different fabrics in different areas. Controls were used, such as using the same material for the bodies whilst changing the material used in the leg panels. This process was repeated with five different fabrics on the legs, each on five different riders to obtain multiple points of reference. Even a mannequin was used as another control to entirely remove any human difference.

“We got a lot of data, which Santini used to make complete suits. When we started to analyse it, we narrowed it down to a few best options, and Santini went away to work on these again to make sure they fitted perfectly. We returned back to the wind tunnel to test again with a wider range of riders. Eventually, we came to the conclusion of which were the best suits.”

Daan Hoole wearing the Santini TT body (©GettyImages)

Elisa Longo Borghini made the Santini TT body winning at Giro d'Italia Women (©GettyImages)

However, as important as aerodynamics are, it’s not the only thing that Santini and Koen have to consider when making high-performance clothing for Lidl-Trek – overheating during a big effort can be even more costly than the potential aerodynamic gains.

“We figured out that out that the top two suits are very close, but the slightly faster one uses a lot of warm fabrics, so we decided that it was not ideal to use this one in warmer circumstances. We wanted to give riders a second option for time trials that would not be as warm, and provides more cooling through the fabric. So, we ended up with two different time trial suits, and on top of that we made a road suit using the option with the better cooling.”

So, with three new suits heading for production, is that the end of the process? “Certainly not,” said Koen. “In the future, we could make the process even more individualized, like we do with helmets, to create unique time trial suits for each rider.”

There are even more gains we can find. Even though we have found three extremely fast suits, having improved our aerodynamics greatly, I still believe that we can get better. It’s an ongoing process and this won’t be the last iteration created between Santini and Lidl-Trek.”

Ciccone during the TT at Tour de France (©Zac Williams)