Thomas Gerlach wrote:
If you want to be the fastest version of yourself, one has to take some accountability in being diligent with race tires, tubes, chains, pulleys, even chainrings, and cassettes in some instance and learning to put them on shortly before a race.
So... this is a genuine question, not meant to be annoying. Do you have a sense of the percent improvement you can gain from swapping out tires, tubes, chains, pulleys, chainrings, and cassettes for a race? Assume that the bike is in general very good working order overall, and that the components are many hundreds of miles away from EoL.
The reason I ask is that I do risk analysis and risk management professionally. Through that, I have many years of experience observing someone's small, last-minute change for a marginal gain result in far worse consequences. I also have many thousands of miles bike riding in my youth and now since I have resumed the sport, and the vast majority of mechanical failures I experienced or friends experienced were the result of a recent change or routine maintenance. Any change increases probability of a failure in the short-term. You can be an expert and extra careful and quadruple-check, but statistically, a change increases a failure probability.
So, the key questions are: What are the incremental performance gains by swapping out components? And, are those gains worth the risk of a mechanical failure that could cost far more in lost time?
For example, if you told me that racing on brand new tires and tubes and some other bits would give me 5%, that is a slam dunk. If the gain was 1%, then I would consider it, and probably do it with great care. If 0.1%, then I would pass.