Beware the Law of Unintended Consequences.
Mavi Garcia’s bike at the recent Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift. At 27 cm between the hoods, these won’t fly next year. (Image: Matt de Neef)
Tom Reynolds has a long and varied history in cycling. He’s the current president of St. Kilda Cycling Club in Melbourne, he’s owned and run teams, and he’s worked for cycling’s governing body here in Australia. In this story, Tom applies some lessons he’s learned from the world of motorsport to some new ‘safety’ initiatives in cycling; reduced handlebar widths, gearing restrictions, and the like.
Cycling isn’t alone in trying to legislate its way to safety or fairness. From handlebar width limits to banned riding positions, well-meaning rules often come with unexpected ripple effects.
Motorsport offers a perfect lens to see why: when you lock down one part of the system, the pressure finds somewhere else to escape. This is The Law of Unintended Consequences at work, and I first saw it in action in the world of motorsports.
Back when I was working in PR for an Australian V8 Supercars team, I was lucky (?!?) enough to have an office downstairs from the team’s dyno room (think a cycling ergo machine but for petrol engines).
One morning, I sat down at my desk to the distinctive sound of the team dyno spinning up race engines from idle to the rev limiter. The sound and methods employed told me these were race engines being tested, as the methodology for road car engine dyno pulls is different. This unscheduled testing was interesting at first, as a supercar race engine being dyno’d is quite an assault on the senses. Interesting, until the dyno ran for a few hours … assaulting my senses.
The next day it ran on and off all day. I’d had enough of both the noise and my growing curiosity. Of course I went and had a look.
In their wisdom, the powers-that-be who were running the championship had decided that a control camshaft was the way forward and had sprung it on the teams. A camshaft controls the rate and timing of the flow of the fuel/air mixture and the flow and timing of the exhaust gasses. With this forced change, the camshaft parameters were now a locked-down part of the equation, and somehow this was going to make the racing closer (because … something, something everyone would end up with the same horsepower torque/power?) and it would also bring down the cost of racing.
“Reduce costs …” That is a common refrain in motorsport, and is reserved for occasions when something truly stupid is being announced.
Back in the dyno room, with the new “Cam of the Future” fitted, the team’s engines had a dip in power right where you’d need it least; right in the bit that wins or loses races.
So the engineering team did what they do best; they ran/blew up race engines flat out for a week. Tuning, rebuilding, refining, fiddling with things they told me I could neither look at nor discuss. (It was the inlet trumpets. Ha!) And they did this until a few hundred thousand dollars had been turned into noise, and the horsepower numbers were back where they needed to be.
This was The Law of Unintended Consequences (hereafter TLoUC) in full effect. This single brilliant money-saving measure ended up costing more than a season of engines for one race car.
Motorsport meets cycling. Cadel Evans visited the Holden Racing Team garage not long after winning the Tour de France in 2011. That’s five-time Bathurst 1000 winner Garth Tander on the left.
Cycling is no stranger to both silly rules and rules designed to squeeze the law. Take the minimum bike weight rule in road racing (6.8 kg). On paper, it stops bikes from being so light they easily break. But in practice, it’s just changed where the weight goes, not how the bikes are made.
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