Aerodynamics of Aero Water Bottle Versus Standard Round Water Bottle

Aero Bottle

Question:
Is an aero bottle any faster than a regular bottle?

Summary:
Data on this has been published by Mark Cote - Aerodynamic Engineer @ Specialized.  He gave drag figures for their aero bottle and determined that an aero bottle is definitely better than a round bottle and even better than a bare frame at basically a head on wind.  No data was available for other yaws. 

Specifics:
The testing by Mark was done with the following protocol:

"Shiv bike alone, Roval Rapide wheels w tubular tires (spinning), head-on drag normalized to 30 mph, rho=1.20"

And this yielded results of:

No bottles: 537 gF 

Round bottle on center of down tube: 556 gF 

Aerobottle on down tube with 1 cm gap to seat tube: 534 gF 

Standard Round Bottle

Mark didn't have any other data available for yaws besides 0.  He also indicated that with a rider on the bike, the aerobottle is still faster, but admits that it is tough to tease out the data with the rider variability.

Aerodynamics of Cycling Shoe Cover

Bottom Line: Disadvantage

I reviewed a study from a sport engineering journal published in March of 2010 titled Cycling Shoe Aerodynamics (Giuseppe Gibertini, Donato Grassi, Carlo Macchi, Giuseppe De Bortoli).  In the study they compared the aerodynamics of a two different sidi shoes - one sleek profile Sidi shoe with laces instead of straps and buckles, and a similar Sidi shoe with the straps and buckles.  In the study the sleek profile shoe performed significantly better than the shoe with straps and buckles.  They then compared the shoes with straps and buckles by itself and the same shoe with a tight fitting shoe cover.  The shoe + cover performed even worse than the shoe by itself.  This study demonstrated a performance disadvantage with shoe covers.