RiceAWay

Looking at my carbon aero wheels and my Campy Nucleon wheels the weight difference is twice for the carbon wheel. A simple manner of speaking about it is to say that you not only halve the weigh with the box rims but you essentially quarter the power to both carry the lower weigh and accelerate the lower weight.

So while when you are NOT accelerating this difference in weight makes almost no difference, when accelerating it makes quite a bit of difference. The Cat 1,2 and 3's are often putting out 1,400 watts out of every corner and that difference in acceleration can be the difference between wining of being the lantern rouge. Maybe you could hold that sort of power if you only had a square four turn course but these 10 turn courses are simply too much for the constant acceleration.

Now we can argue that the deep aero rims don't have so bad an effect on acceleration as the box rims via terms of radius, but the overall effect is that it requires a tremendously large amount of human power to ride crits and you are on the very limit every second of the race if you are a contender so this acceleration makes a rather large difference.

Here is a pretty good explanation with the math involved - https://physics.stackexchange.com/qu...n-acceleration