I made a start on a Sketchup 3D drawing to have something to point sticks and throw rocks at. The first task is to cover the rider and front wheels. I wanted to keep a simple shape, and deal seperately with the head above the shoulders to give minimum frontal area. The body frontal area is determined by the height and width of the shoulders, and the height of the knees as they cycle. The wheels cause a lot of turbulence. If you enclose them, then the body has to be wide enough for steering clearance at full lock. If you try to pursue one aspect of a design for purity of function it has a terrible habit of showing up flaws in another area. I don’t like compromise, but trying to find the best balance of the least offensive solutions is often the most you can hope for. I had already been through this with the “Blimp”, so that seemed a good starting point for development.

Building the drawing in two parts and combining them was too much lke hard work and showed up how difficult the real construction could be. So I combined the head faring into the main body, at the cost of increased frontal area.

This looked OK until I put in the clearnce for the feet. This gave two ‘nostrils’ which appeared to be scooping air into the body.

I added an air-dam but this unbalanced the look badly, I tried an elliptical dam guiding the air around the wheels and away again, but again it looked very difficult to build and keep light. The dam would have be able to to rise over Speed Bumps, adding complication, weight and jamming.

In order to divert the air around the feet I lowered nose, and the tail, to smooth the air flow and balance the shape.