- Would his life have been a lot easier had he not had stupid clippy shoes? It's not like he was pulling on the pedals, and it seems a lot of his slow speed issues were with clipping in, and unclipping.
Sort of: Once you know what you're doing, foot retention is much more useful on a recumbent than on an upright, as otherwise you're fighting gravity to keep your feet on the pedals.
But if you don't know what you're doing, it's just another thing to worry about as when you try to start off (which is the most difficult thing on a bike like that, particularly uphill), and it's potentially stopping you from getting a foot down quickly when you lose balance. To be fair, the latter effect is minimal: When I learned to ride a recumbent, I was used to clipless pedals, and only failed to unclip on the very first crash (I suspect because I had yet to recognise that type of wobble as a stall).
Another factor is that roadie shoes are particularly rubbish at gripping on, well, anything that isn't pedals, especially when your feet are nowhere near your centre of mass and the surface is slippery. Putting a foot down and having it fail to grip the ground is a hazard, but mostly one of embarrassment, as a slow-motion fall from a lowracer is unlikely to damage anything. Tall people can reach the ground with their hands when stationary, which appears to be useful. I can't do it.
But ultimately, a Raptobike is very much being dropped in at the deep end. Sensible people get the general idea on a more relaxed touring-geometry machine before progressing to twitchy racing bikes with extremely reclined seat angles. That way you're just learning the bike, rather than how to ride one.
- He taped his mic transmitter to the top of the Alpha 7 because of the carbon fibre apparently blocking the signal. Is this really the case? does that mean if you're phone is in your pocket inside a carbon fibre bike like the alpha 7, you don't get any signal? Any issues with GPSr device positioning?
I know our RFID timing tags don't work properly if stuck to carbon fibre. I expect phone and GPS signals manage to find their way through the openings, mostly.
I doubt the radio mic signal was blocked completely, just enough to make the recording unusable.
- The sound from within the alpha 7 sounded very rattly. Like someone had dropped a box of spanners in the bottom. Is that the normal sound that a velo makes? Are they really noisy?
In my limited experience, yes: The body acts as a sounding board for all the usual trike vibrations. Same applies to rigid tailboxes and the like, though at least then your head isn't inside them.
Although it's always worse when you listen to a mono recording of noisy surroundings from a not-particularly-directional microphone than it is when you listen directly through a binaural pair of human ears. The Cocktail Party Effect applies.
On the other hand, if your head is sheltered from the airflow, you get less wind noise in your ears directly.
