A few weeks back I had an epiphany. During a damn good trip out on my friend’s yacht, I suddenly found myself overdosing on all the sensation that I had been missing out on in virtually all of the modern cars I’ve driven in recent years. Steering systems in cars today deny us of the feel, communication and sensitivity that was once abundant in even humble cars of the past. It’s an evolution thing- the information may not be there but we can be pretty sure the grip is, and the car will make the turn. The tiller of a sailing boat, though, is loaded with information thanks to physics. The feeling is so real you could eat it.
It was after this tactile reawakening that I found myself thinking about other things a car does that we rarely feel, and one that struck me was that we’re hardly ever aware of how much effort the engine is putting into those daily errands we dismiss as trivial. There’s one easy way to remind ourselves.
You gotta ride a bicycle.


Ever since somebody on TV pointed out that sitting at a desk all day is gonna kill me, I’ve recently taken to riding my bike again. I used to put loads of bicycle miles in, this abruptly ending the day I got my driving license. 18 years – or half my life later, I make sure to put in at least half an hour on two wheels during my lunch break, an hour if I can afford it, with a view to staying alive.
Of course, hard work and exercise are made easier when there’s a reward at the end of it, and on this basis my wife and I set off on a twenty-two mile round trip to a local beer festival. The ride gave me plenty of time to think, and more importantly, ample opportunity to feel.
Those of you who are athletic, Ironman types, regular cyclists or, frankly, merely less disgustingly out of shape than me will have to show leniency when I say this, but cycling is hard work. That, after all, is why I do it. Any day now it’ll become easy, but right now, while my body is still getting used to the mechanical demands made of it, I’m feeling every degree of exertion in vivid detail.
Join me in aligning myself with an engine. I’m a baby Fiat. Each of my legs is a piston, both combining to provide scant power and each turning a crank at 180 degree intervals. I don’t have a lot of power so every bit that I’ve got has to be wisely deployed. Typically, when I initially leap onto my Specialized Hardrock (I sometimes call it a Haddock thanks to the over-stylised typeface) and accelerate away to a decent cruising speed, often in an inappropriately high gear like 24th for much chain-stretching, chainset abuse, I am essentially transmitting a violent immediate release of all my power. My theory being that once I hit over 20mph I can back off to a relaxing cruise.
Sustaining 20mph seated on my bike is a little ambitious with its knobblies, MTB gearing and an absence of smooth enough road surface to make it a reality, but in still air 16-18mph is reasonable going. After a couple of hundred yards my knees have regained their strength and I’m ready to release power again where it’s needed.

It’s when trying to sustain a seated cruise on my bike that I realise how much effort my engine is putting in. On my way to the beer festival the air was either still or running a few knots in my favour, so I didn’t feel any particular resistance. The same wasn’t true of the road, though. My Cateye cycle computer is precise enough to confirm every baud of information my legs are receiving as the surface I’m traversing changes.
Every single subtle variance has the effect of increasing or decreasing the effort placed at the crank by my two pistons. I find that the coarser tarmac at the sides of the roads robs me of 0.2mph compared to the traffic-smoothed blacktop towards the centre line, so I constantly aim for any surface that looks to offer less resistance. It’s amazing how little extra road coarseness is required before you feel the extra resistance through the pedals.
Then, of course, there’s gradient. Just as how a precise hi-fi will expose and highlight imperfections in a badly played, recorded, produced or mastered piece of music, the wrong guy on a bike can turn a molehill into a mountain. Not wanting to resort to standing on my pedals and using full power for fear of exceeding my stamina, I’ll be on the gears at the first sniff of extra effort. And rapidly, as the incline builds, the gears will fall.
As I get used to the bike, I begin to re-learn the ranges. There are three blocks of eight gears, the top of which should allow a fit person plenty of variance for fast-ish touring, although too much time in eighth or 17th gear is ill-advised thanks to the extra wear and tear of cross-gearing. So for the these moderate increases in grade I can drop a ratio when I need, a quick click down on the index button is all it takes.
It’s tempting, if the peak of the hill is in sight, to ride it out. If you’re still losing momentum you have the choice of either dropping a cog and losing more speed but maintaining current levels of exertion, or staying in gear and putting in more effort. A fit, right-minded person would stand up and use a bit of additional power. I, lazy and thinking of the beer at journey’s end, remain seated… but stay in gear.

What I do know feels like the equivalent of labouring the engine. From a sitting position, without increasing the number of revs by dropping further through the gears, I’m using whatever torque I have left to propel the bike to the apogee of the hill, having recognised that it’s close enough to do so. Once it’s crested I can flick back up through the gears to regain the speed I’ve lost and return to my 18mph target cruise.
The resultant lactic acid build up in my legs can be felt  though it wanes very quickly- it’s the ‘feel the burn’ of so many misguided pep-talks. I could have avoided it by dropping down a cog or eight, but that might have meant slowing to walking pace, and a whole different kind of effort. I had laboured my engine, but normal operating speed was now resumed and I could deal with the next force that came to meet me.
Wind resistance. In my car I forget all about it. Wind is that stuff that causes annoying whistles from my Audi door seal when going over 130, and much hilarity when crossing high bridges. In a reasonably aerodynamic car with a decent amount of power, wind resistance has more impact on my monthly fuel bill than it does on my car’s ability to sustain high speeds. Of course, for an Audi to sustain 80mph is easy, but the fuel bill will go up if you’re doing it into a strong headwind.
The extra effort the Audi is expending to hold a cruise in a headwind is, proportionally, a fraction of what my little Fiat legs are having to put in to achieve the same result. Sustaining 18mph in still air on a flat surface proves doable, but when the wind turns against me the fight against this invisible air-treacle is most frustrating. 24th gear becomes a no-go-zone, 18mph becomes a distant dream. I start dropping gears, then begin to wonder whether 16th might be a better bet than 24th. I settle on 18th – though I am again slightly labouring my pistons – but I stay on the right side of 12mph. All because of a light breeze. When you’ve got barely any power, you really feel it.

We almost never suffer from a genuine lack of power in cars today, and when we do it’s often because we’re making impossible demands or plain ole driving it wrong. I remember Jeremy Clarkson once reviewing a Mitsubishi Evo FQ400 on Top Gear and complaining of turbo lag. He then tried to illustrate this by having two cars, the Evo and a Fiat Stilo Estate, both in sixth gear side-by-side at 30mph, and then kicking the throttle. The economy Stilo pulled away from the ferocious Evo but, of course, this was nothing to do with turbo lag at all and everything to do with Jeremy being in entirely the wrong gear to expect any acceleration at all.
People have this belief that power is everything, and it kind of is, really. But only if it’s deployed correctly. This was what I was to later be reminded on suddenly meeting a steep hill on my way home.
There’s a pretty steep descent through a challenging triple-apex left hander which then flips into a flat 90 degree right hander, then another left. After I accelerated with all my might on the flat to 28 mph before gravity caused my maximum RPM to be exceeded on the downhill, My Cateye indicated 36.8 mph. I held onto the bar-ends and crouched down to a vaguely aerodynamic posture and tried to jealously guard those mph, resistance immediately dropped the speed but I was able to keep pedalling at 26mph… until I hit the uphill.
What I should have done was get myself ready to get pedalling in a low gear for the ascent into my village, but I didn’t. I figured I could shift ‘on the fly’, but I had missed my chance. The feeling through my legs when the ascent began was like hitting a brick wall, and had potentially dangerous consequences for my chainset. I slammed down through my gears but was unable to catch one low enough in time. I stalled.
Game over. It was a stall, that was exactly what it was. Wrong gear for the revs – no acceleration. The only thing I could do was turn my bike around, pedal downhill a few feet to get into first gear, and then crank my way up the hill at walking pace. If I had managed to time things better I could probably have stood on the pedals and used my torque to get up the hill – labouring heavily- in fifth or sixth or, if I had preserved enough momentum, maybe ninth, but I had nothing. The hill seemed endless, and 2.8mph was all I could hope for at realistic leg-piston rpms.
I was a baby Fiat, and I now know far more of the pain a car goes through in order to supply the performance we take for granted.

As a side note, the beer festival was tremendous. I live in area steeped in maritime history, and the festival was set in the Harwich Redoubt, a Napoleonic fortification that once defended the approach to Felixstowe docks. I whole-heartedly recommend the Wibblers Summer Days at 5.9%.
(All images copyright Chris Haining / Hooniverse 2016)