[Little Pig]

Correcting myself. I see that this is indeed a new factory trike. I misallocated his “millions of miles” to this one bike, instead of his past activities.

That makes it worse. There’s no way a new trike would somehow burn a clutch just because of those flags, especially given the added weight of the trike frame. And I’d be really interested to hear how “Harley” flag mounts would have made the situation better, particularly since both would result in the same final configuration.

[HiTech RedNeck]

I think the “official” mounts are tilted back more.

There is going to be “some” drag.

Here’s an engineering paper. The squarer the flag, the more drag it has.

http://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/1.9754?journalCode=ja

[dennisw]

Your logic is correct!