This abstract deals with the objective evaluation of the handling and stability behavior of a bicycle through tests and simulations. The aim is tracing guidelines and recommendations for the dynamic characterization of bicycles, and showing how simulation tools from the motorcycle field are a valid means to drive product development.

A new commercial software package for the minimum-time optimal-control simulation of motorcycles, named OMS (Optimal Maneuver Simulation), is presented. OMS integrates a set of tried-and-tested components (vehicle and road models, solver) in a single software package that allows a team new to minimum-time simulation to kick-start this activity. A typical use case of OMS is performing a sensitivity analysis on some vehicle parameters to assess the effect of different vehicle configurations on the lap-time performance on a given track.

This work deals with the longitudinal vibrations of the front fork of a bicycle that may originate under front braking, reporting novel experimental evidence and proposing interpretative models to gain insights into the possible causes. In order to acquire experimental evidence of the phenomenon under study, specific road tests were conducted using four component combinations. A modal analysis was performed to investigate the dynamic properties of the front-end components of the bicycle involved in the vibrations observed on the road and estimate the parameters necessary to populate the lumped-element model, devised with the aim of seeking a set of structural parameters that can reduce the sensitivity of the vehicle to different combinations of brake friction materials.