Lance
Armstrong Goes for 5th Tour de France Win in a Row on Trek Bicycles
Designed with Alias|Wavefront Software
Armstrong's
Racing Bike, the Trek Madone 5.9
Toronto, Canada - July 14, 2003 - Alias|Wavefront™,
an SGI (NYSE: SGI) company, announced today that its StudioToolsÔ
software has enabled Trek® Bicycle to create, in a record
five months, the two bicycles Lance Armstrong will ride in this
year’s 21 stage Tour de France®. StudioTools computer-aided
industrial design software helped the Trek team create the lightest,
most streamlined design in the company’s history, one that
is expected to cut a minute or more off of the longer race stages.
This year marks Armstrong’s fifth attempt to win for the
U.S. Postal Service team, a feat that will tie for the most consecutive
victories in Tour de France history. For all five races the super
athlete has used Trek bicycles designed with StudioTools software.
Trek's frame design
Record Breaking Delivery
The
bike Armstrong rides in the time trial stages took Trek seven
months to move from concept to reality in the year 2000. That
was a remarkable accomplishment at the time, given that earlier
bikes required 12 to 14 months to develop. This year the design
team was able to break its own record, creating an all new peloton
model, the Madone 5.9, in just five months.
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Wind tunnel test of Madone
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The time trial bike is used in the three short distance race stages
of under 100 kilometers. This year Trek changed the frame to incorporate
a different type of carbon technology, using a lighter carbon
and honeycomb carbon combination. The Madone will be ridden by
Armstrong for the rest of the stages, some of them 190 kilometers
or more. For this bike Trek incorporated its signature OCLV Carbon
technology, but made it lighter and more aerodynamic.
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High
Confidence in Digital Designs
Trek
is meeting compressed timelines by relying more and more on its
digital assets. With the Madone, for instance, engineers wanted
to find ways to make the frame more aerodynamic so they used the
StudioTools model to run a computational fluid dynamic analysis.
Testing at the Oran J. Nicks Low Speed Wind Tunnel at Texas A&M
University confirmed the team’s success. The bike frame
saved Armstrong 10 watts of energy, equating to a savings of an
entire minute in a 200 kilometer stage race.
The group’s confidence in its digital prototype was also
tested when it was time to assemble the Madone frame. Unlike other
carbon bike makers who use a single, monoquoque scheme, Trek makes
a lugged frame composed of nine parts, each of which is optimized
for such factors as weight and material thickness. These parts
must fit together perfectly – and they did -- on the first
try. The decision to rely solely on a digital model saved the
team an entire month because they were able to forego a physical
prototype.
Nine
Part Frame Design
Ride
Armstrong’s Bike
While
Lance Armstrong is conquering the Alps this July, Trek is making
it possible for road bike enthusiasts everywhere to share in the
glory by riding on their own Tour de France bike. With growing
confidence in the speed, flexibility and accuracy of the designs
created in StudioTools, this year Trek will mass produce seven
different sizes of the peloton bike and make it available to the
public soon after the Tour de France.
Michael Sagan, Trek’s Industrial Design Group Senior Designer,
says, “Now that we have completed Lance’s frame, our
focus is on making six more sizes. Thanks to StudioTools we can
deliver on our project mission statement: Creating frames as fast
as Lance!”
About
Alias|Wavefront
As
the world’s leading innovator of 3D graphics technology,
Alias|Wavefront develops software for industrial design and visualization
markets, film and video, games, web and interactive media. Alias|Wavefront’s
design customers include AT&T, BMW, Boeing, Fiat, Ford, General
Motors, Honda, Italdesign, Kodak, Kwikset, Mattel, Price Pfister,
Renault, Rollerblade, Sharp, Trek Bicycle, Teague and Timex.
In 1998, the company was awarded a Technical Achievement Award
from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the creation
of technology on which StudioTools is based.
Alias|Wavefront is a wholly owned, independent software company
of SGI® with headquarters in Toronto and custom development
center in Santa Barbara.
Please visit the Alias|Wavefront web site at www.aliaswavefront.com
or call 1-800-447-2542 in North America. International contact
numbers include: Northern Europe, Middle East and Africa, +44
(0) 1494 441273; Germany, East & Southeast Europe, 0049 89
31 70 20; Italy, 39 039 6340011, France, Spain and Portugal, +33
1 44 92 81 60; Japan, 35 797 3500; other parts of Asia Pacific,
81 3 3470 8282 and Latin America, 770 393 1881.
The
Alias|Wavefront logo and the StudioTools logo are registered trademarks
and Alias|Wavefront and StudioTools are trademarks of Alias|Wavefront,
a division of Silicon Graphics Limited. SGI is a registered trademark
of Silicon Graphics, Inc. Trek is a registered trademark and OCLV
Carbon is a trademark of Trek Bicycle, Corp. Tour de France is
a registered trademark of the Societe du Tour de France. All other
products or companies mentioned are trademarks or service marks
of their respective owners. Alias|Wavefront, 210 King Street East,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5A 1J7, Tel: 416-362-9181, FAX: 416-369-6140.
