Photo: Lotus
Come the end of July, the 2024 Summer Olympics will kick off in the French capital Paris. It's the 33rd edition of the multi-sport event that has mesmerized the world since times immemorial. This year the Olympics will welcome into the ranks of accepted sports breakdancing, but all of the previous ones remain. Including track cycling, a sport one of the world's most important carmakers has quite a long history with.
The carmaker's name is Lotus, or more recently its offshoot, Lotus Engineering, which for years has been designing track bikes for the British Cycling team for years. And it just did that once again for the 2024 Paris Games, unveiling a bike whose design was inspired by a… fighter jet. Sure, we're not told exactly what that's supposed to mean, but you have to hand it to Lotus for getting us all hyped up about this new product of theirs.
The two-wheeler is the work of Lotus with help from Renishaw and Hope Technology, and it will officially be known as the Hope-Lotus. It is, if you will, a successor to the bike the British team used at the previous Olympic games, the ones held in Tokyo in 2020.
That design helped the Brits win no less than seven Olympic medals, getting on top of the table at the end of it all.
The new bike is in large part the work of the company's chief aerodynamicist Richard Hill, who back in the 1990s contributed to two of Britain's most iconic competition bikes, the Lotus 108 and the 110 Tour De France.
For the new ride Lotus and its partners designed a new front fork and handlebars. The former piece of hardware comes with a new serrated edge to allow for smoother airflow around the rider. The fork is made of high-grade carbon fiber of the same variety Lotus uses on the Evija hypercar, thus keeping weight as low as possible (exact specifications of the bike, weight included, were not disclosed).
The handlebars, on the other hand, are customizable by nature, and they too are meant to help with aerodynamics. More specifically they allow for a more efficient position when racing for longer. To top off these new elements, Lotus says the integration between the handlebar and fork helps significantly reduce drag.
The 2024 Summer Olympics kicks off in Paris on July 26 and will be ongoing until August 11. Track cycling takes place in a 250m bowl-shaped arena connoisseurs call a velodrome. There are several different races for the sport, each with its own rules and techniques.
Unlike traditional bikes, track racing ones are fixed gear and do not have any brakes. That makes them quite difficult to handle, and they require special training and a lot of experience to ride.
The two-wheeler is the work of Lotus with help from Renishaw and Hope Technology, and it will officially be known as the Hope-Lotus. It is, if you will, a successor to the bike the British team used at the previous Olympic games, the ones held in Tokyo in 2020.
That design helped the Brits win no less than seven Olympic medals, getting on top of the table at the end of it all.
The new bike is in large part the work of the company's chief aerodynamicist Richard Hill, who back in the 1990s contributed to two of Britain's most iconic competition bikes, the Lotus 108 and the 110 Tour De France.
For the new ride Lotus and its partners designed a new front fork and handlebars. The former piece of hardware comes with a new serrated edge to allow for smoother airflow around the rider. The fork is made of high-grade carbon fiber of the same variety Lotus uses on the Evija hypercar, thus keeping weight as low as possible (exact specifications of the bike, weight included, were not disclosed).
The handlebars, on the other hand, are customizable by nature, and they too are meant to help with aerodynamics. More specifically they allow for a more efficient position when racing for longer. To top off these new elements, Lotus says the integration between the handlebar and fork helps significantly reduce drag.
The 2024 Summer Olympics kicks off in Paris on July 26 and will be ongoing until August 11. Track cycling takes place in a 250m bowl-shaped arena connoisseurs call a velodrome. There are several different races for the sport, each with its own rules and techniques.
Unlike traditional bikes, track racing ones are fixed gear and do not have any brakes. That makes them quite difficult to handle, and they require special training and a lot of experience to ride.
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