I carefully wiped my tires from my first years of racing in the mid-1960s until the early 2000s, when I happened on
Jobst Brandt's argument that it's pointless to do so. (Sheldon Brown, on the same page, says that he's dubious concerning Brandt's reasoning, but I was convinced.)
In any event, my experience over the decades has corroborated a wise observation by a fellow-racer in 1974: "It's not the ones you see that get you, it's the ones you don't see."