Letter to the UCI on the Downtube Attachment Rule

My interest as a bicycle designer is that when moving the downtube to above the chainrings, a significant drag reduction is accrued by this polo-bike frame style, thus making the bicycle as a machine more efficient.

Now, since common street bicycles copy the official form, which is slower, this actually costs billions of calories of food to be eaten for no reason by riders per day worldwide who are using their bicycles for transportation, in reality if these frames had their downtubes above the chainrings that food would not be needed per day.

So, with the importance of the bicycle as basic transportation worldwide and its use by the poorest people on the planet, this seemingly benigh attempt at a "level playing field" actually is costing these poor to eat more per day using their bicycle as transportation.

There is no structural need to alter anything on a bicycle made with the downtube above the chainrings, the standard tubing wall thickness doesn't change until above this point so needn't be changed in alloy, temper or dimenesions; it requires re-jigging the downtube on an assembly line along with changing the headtube attachment, no other changes are needed to manufacture this design and the scaling of them to the world ridership saves energy by design.

Please could you seriously consider this issue, as I state it seems rather off, but has a huge effect on efficiency of the basic machine, on the order of 1-mph increase in average speed by simply moving the tube up for a traditional road machine with '70's tubing, thus a very significant percentage of the work being done to overcome aerodynamic drag is removed.

While this will effect racing speeds, that is only one facet to consider in the same light as an engineering change to the machine for transportation, hard to ignore the vast influence the UCI rules have on manufacturing.

The UCI can be seen as a leader in using its knowledge for the betterment of humanity to pursue this.

Respectfully yours,
tom mallard