Recently, Escape’s Ronan McLaughlin surfaced from a multi-month outdoor tyre testing project. That test not only sought to find which fast road race tyres were fastest, but also to study the testing itself.

All of this was only made possible with the expertise and instruments made available by John Buckley of Streamlines. As a former lead aerodynamicist at Mercedes F1, Buckley brought a unique skill set to cycling, and works with a number of professional cycling teams and national federations to find performance gains.

In this bonus episode of Geek Warning that crosses over with Performance Process, Dave Rome peels back the layers to better understand the science and methodology behind Streamlines’ approach to outdoor testing. The conversation covers topics such as why drum testing alone doesn’t provide the full story, and where there may be limitations in the Virtual Elevation method of testing (aka, the Chung method).

Happy geeking!

After years spent posting screenshots of prototypes, the time has come for the person behind the account to lift the lid on their true identity.

We talk about why now, how the account grew and where it reached its natural limits, and the engineering path that led from Formula One to a World Tour team.

We all know how critical rider position is when it comes to aerodynamics. We also know how difficult, time consuming, and costly it can be to properly test and optimise our positions using wind tunnels or field testing.

In this episode, Ronan explores a different approach.

Ingmar Jungnickel joins the Performance Process podcast to discuss Airo, a commercially available CFD-based platform designed to make aerodynamic testing more accessible, more iterative, and potentially more useful for a far broader range of riders. Instead of testing a handful of positions over an entire day, Airo promises the ability to explore multiple directions in minutes, using digital twins and cloud-based simulation.

But cycling aerodynamics is not simple. Transitional Reynolds numbers, rider movement, fabric interaction, and the complexity of real-world flow all raise legitimate questions about how useful CFD can actually be in this space. That’s what this episode digs into.

Ingmar brings 15 years of experience at the sharp end of performance – from WorldTour wind tunnel work to Olympic-level innovation in speed skating – and offers a detailed look at where Airo and CFD fits today, where it falls short, and where it could reshape how we approach optimisation in the future.