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How much has velodrome technology increased speeds? Air temp and pressure were known about but have the boards themselves got better?
miro_o-
Yes, track design must have some influence on speeds.
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How much has velodrome technology increased speeds? have the boards themselves got better?
There's probably room for improvement in the actual choice of board material, pine planking is chosen for a mix of reasons and I don't think minimising rolling resistance has ever been one of them. There are aspects of track shape which influence speed, notably the distribution between curves and straights, with long curves favouring pursuit (but making match sprinting pretty dull, as it becomes almost impossible to win from the back in a reasonably close match). There is always a problem with the transition from straight to curve, and a separate but related problem of having the black line lie in a single horizontal plane. The 1996 Atlanta track was designed to be 'flat' using a computational model which wouldn't have been available for such a trivial task until the 1980s, but I don't think it's an approach which has been widely adopted. It seems that there is scope to model the interaction between a bicycle and a track surface to minimise resistance at a given speed. The UCI has minimum and maximum permitted track lengths for competition, which precludes making a tiny 'wall-of-death' track for record breaking :-)
hippy
gbj_tester
Moser was at altitude* and on blood doping at least, but no tri bars. The big wheel is a marginal gain, and the one he used for 51.151 wasn't big anyway, the big wheels came later for a separate indoor record of 50.644km
Jens had 30 years of training science, frame design and clothing development to help him, plus the tribars which might be worth anything from 1 to 2km in an hour.
I was hoping Jens would make the extra few metres and hit 51.151 :-)
*in 1986, he set a separate sea-level record of 48.543km. Although information is sketchy, he may have later improved that to 49.8km, possibly with larger wheels.