Michael Phelps' winning new formula

Matt Majendie
27 Jan 2012

With eight gold medals at the last Olympics, Michael Phelps does not exactly need additional help to beat his rivals. But the American's swimwear provider has learned from other sports, most notably Formula 1, to come up with an innovative system it believes will give Phelps and its other swimmers the edge from the moment they first dive into the pool at London 2012.

Leading that process is Dr Tom Waller, head of Speedo's Aqualab in Nottingham, where the Fastskin3 - as its new combination of cap, goggles and swimsuit, unveiled earlier this month, is known - was created.

Dr Waller said: "When it comes to the aerodynamic package of an F1 car, the part that's most important and is given the most focus is the front wing and the airflow over the car after that. If you relate that to swimwear, we needed to come up with something that works from the tips of the fingers to the tips of the toes."

The result is a racing system in which cap, goggles and suit all work in unison. In all, the swimwear achieves a full-body passive drag reduction of 16.6 per cent, an 11 per cent improvement in the swimmers' oxygen economy -enabling them to swim harder for longer - and a 5.2 per cent fall in body active drag.

The process began using computational fluid dynamics - a system that performs calculations to solve problems involving the flow of air or, in this case, water over a solid object.

Using cutting-edge software, the team came up with designs for their swimmers, who include Phelps and British duo Rebecca Adlington and Liam Tancock.

"The CFD is great but what it can't tell you is whether the suit is comfortable for a swimmer, so we got the athletes in on the process from the very outset," Waller said.

The Fastskin3 has been available globally since January 1 - under the rules of world swimming body FINA, no swimsuit can be designed for an individual but must be available for the public at large.

Looking ahead to 2012, Dr Waller said: "This is the best thing we could have done, the first time it's been attempted and we're looking forward to proving it's the right way. We're confident this will help our swimmers be the fastest they can be. Hopefully we've come up with something quite special."