Starling bikes say, don't buy a new bike

Yeah, I'd agree about taking anything he says with a massive pinch of salt.

However, I'm also taking road.cc articles where they tell me I can save 20W if I spend a few thousand on a set of wheels with a massive pinch of salt, as well.

But the fact both articles seem to come to roughly the same final number is interesting.

Still not spending 3K on my next wheelset though.

I’m not sure I buy the argument about percentage time saved vs absolute time saved.  No matter how slow I go (and believe me, I can go slow) I am absolutely certain the pros are spending far far more time than me in the saddle.

Back in the McLaren era of the Specialized Venge they (or one of the mags) ran a similar article where the author rode a Tarmac and a Venge around a race circuit.  Based on the wind data and their power meter McLaren could (obviously without an actual proof beyond an assurance that the models were well validated) say that he was so many seconds quicker on the Venge even though he admitted he was deliberately sandbagging to try and upset the data (i.e. his Venge time was slower, but they could still quantify how much quicker it was than if he'd done the same lap on the tarmac, and the reverse was true, his fast lap on the tarmac would have been faster on the venge, but not by as much.

So it's an idea the industry seems to have been settled on for quite a while.

20W's not to be sniffed at even if it is optimistic.  20W on your FTP is a solid 10 week training block for most people.  Probably more than they manage to improve over a summers un-structured riding.

From the graph in the article it looks like they are saying that just by switching to 80mm rims you will save 20W over regular box rims (at the right yaw angle although they don’t say what the effective wind speed is which is kind of important).

It is road.cc, not a scientific journal like the International Sports Engineering Association (fun fact, I did once have my research published in their journal which is how I know it exists!) so I can forgive them not publishing a follow-up paper studying the effect at different velocities as well as angles.

I remember reading an interview about 1p years ago with one of the TDF riders on a Specialized sponsored teams who said he was as fast on his carbon as he was on his Roubaix as he was on his Race bike (and it was more comfy) but Specialized said they had to use their race bikes as that’s how they sell them.

20W’s not to be sniffed at even if it is optimistic.  20W on your FTP is a solid 10 week training block for most people.  Probably more than they manage to improve over a summers un-structured riding.

Absolutely.

I just can't shake the suspicion that there is a way of getting the same effect with a Mavic 119 rim, a carving knife, and a big lump of high density polyurethane foam 🙂