Our exact simulation numbers, and the wind tunnel studies that agree with them.
Monsoon Cycles, Colorado Springs · Updated August 21, 2026
Most articles about drafting say "up to 40 percent" and move on. Here is exactly what our simulation does, and then what the actual research measured, because the numbers are more interesting than the slogan.
When you ride 2 to 11 meters behind another rider and hold their line, the game cuts your aerodynamic drag area by 28 percent. Everything else stays honest: rolling resistance still costs you, gravity still costs you, only the wind gets cheaper.
Worked example at 40 km/h on the flat, for a 75kg rider on our standard 9kg bike: riding solo takes about 331 watts (286 fighting air, 46 fighting the road). Tucked in behind a wheel, the same speed takes about 251 watts. An 80 watt discount for sitting in the right spot.
The classic studies agree with each other to a surprising degree. Chester Kyle's 1979 wind tunnel work measured 38 percent drag reduction sitting 0.3 meters off the wheel ahead, falling to 28 percent at 1.4 meters of gap. So our 28 percent is not a house number: it is Kyle's measurement at about a wheel and a half of daylight, which is where people actually ride.
McCole and colleagues confirmed it outside the tunnel in 1990, measuring the oxygen uptake of riders drafting on a real road: roughly a quarter to a third less energy at racing speeds, and the benefit grew with speed.
Then in 2018, Bert Blocken's group ran a computational model of a full 121-rider peloton, simulated down to billions of computational cells, and found something wilder. Buried mid-pack, a rider's drag falls to 5 to 10 percent of riding alone. Not 5 to 10 percent less: 5 to 10 percent of the whole thing. A rider in the belly of a peloton at 45 km/h is doing the aerodynamic work of soft-pedaling alone at 15. That is why breakaways get caught.
Air drag grows with the cube of speed while rolling resistance grows linearly, so the draft matters more the faster the group goes. At 25 km/h the wheel in front of you is worth maybe 25 watts. At 45 it is worth over 100. And the draft has edges: drift out of line or let the gap open past 11 meters and the discount is gone. Which is exactly how it feels outdoors, and why crit racers guard wheels like property.
Feel it yourself: get behind the motorpace car or any bot in the game and watch your watts drop at the same speed.