Originally Posted by
hubcyclist
I'm still on my pseudo-quest regarding wheels, which is funny considering I've also been on the wheels are kind of overrated bandwagon. I've been looking back at old rides from 3-4 years ago when I was less in shape and was regularly riding over 18mph, and I'm attributing that to the fact that I had some aero wheels (some cheap colnago branded ones), which I sold with my old bike. I was going over 18mph on rides at around 200np whereas rides in the past year on my Allez with stock wheels have been at 17ish at around 200w NP (last week I had 227w NP to average over 18 over 63miles). At least that's the simple explanation where I don't take the million other factors like wind and hills into account lol
Also, I have the new Edge 530, really wanted it in part to do navigation and also trainerroad workouts outside, haven't done a workout outdoors yet, but the navigation part is great and hopefully I can get out and do routes that I'm not familiar with rather than the same old ones.
IMO, Triathlon (and Time Trialing) popularized it with the X amount of time of 40k, which really doesn't fit well into the discussion of road racing. That scenario only works for solo breakaways, and while there are benefits of race wheels, they don't use the context of what road or crit racers wound benefit from because its not as impressive. How the rider navigates the pack almost can almost completely mitigate it so then the benefits are times the racer is exposed to the wind, which is either going to be a pull or a sprint.
So if I go off one of the sites that claims aero wheels give you 65 seconds over normal ones, that's .065 of a second over 250 meters which is (I'm guessing here) is 2 bike lengths. That doesn't account for the jump, leadout, and timing which are more important. Also the bike industry now seems to think you can race on 60's in any condition...
I'm not trying to downsell them because I do think they are worth it but its not something you absolutely need to compete.