Our revolutionary Rocket Bottle has made the "Recent Tech" section of CyclingNews.com.
Understandably as was reflected in the news, our bottle can make a difference which may be hard to comprehend. I thought I'd make some additions and clarifications to the article for you all.
First I wanted to mention that this bottle was designed in 2004 by Marcin Sochacki, founder and CEO of Rocket Science Sports. Since Marcin was classicly trained in the field of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas, he didn't need to make and test a bunch of prototypes before getting it right. His knowledge affords us a great advantage when it comes to design and engineering. This base is what we use to create the most technologically advanced products seen on the market. Coupled with Marcin's personal experience in competitive swimming, triathlons and road racing, we are able to understand what the athlete's needs are and resolve them with, well, rocket science of course!
Testing took place at A&M University's low speed wind tunnel. We were sharing wind tunnel time with John Cobb who was there doing some work with Blackwell Research. John was amazed at Marcin's bottle design and the numbers it yielded. He asked if he could take the data with him to do some additional crunching. Off the top the wind tunnels tests proved that our bottle reduced drag by 16% over a standard smooth surfaced bottle of the same size. That's while ON the bike and IN a bottle cage. The cage we used was an Arundel Trident which in my opinion actually covers more of the bottle surface than some other brands. With that in mind the dimpled surface wasn't even allowed to work as efficiently as might be possible with a cage offering less surface coverage.
Although this picture shows our bottle on the down tube, the best data recorded was on the seat tube.
What John came back to us with was a 40km time savings of up to 51 seconds at 30mph. Now you might be thinking that 30mph is an unrealistic speed for most to attain. Remember though that this could be acheived by a 20mph pace with a 10mph headwind or a 25mph pace with a 5mph headwind. These are very realistic pace and headwind examples.
On the other side of things is Marcin's conservative calculation of time savings is about 15 seconds/40km. How many seconds are between competitors during a time trial? Last year's US Time Trial Championship saw the top 5 people coming in within 15 seconds of each other.
So whether you are a top athlete fighting for podium position or just want to squeeze out a few seconds over your riding buddies for bragging rights, spending $10 on one of these bottles is a no-brainer.
Keep an eye out for our bottles on the US pro circuit. Professional Cycling Team Toshiba-Santo presented by Herbalife will be using our bottles exclusively for their time trial events. The picture below is of Bobby Sweeting at the US Time Trial Championships in September of 2007.
