to me the 30mm tyres are the interesting part. san remo is big ring all the way ride for top pros so yeah, why not ditch the unnecessary parts.
as far as i am aware though, the road surface is pretty reasonable so to see WvA running tyre widths that are more like what you'd expect at roubaix is interesting. i can see that for such a long race the comfort/body preservation aspect is significant but minimising all resistance is still the biggest thing. when most are debating 25mm vs 28mm this is another level!

Not likely giving up any rolling resistance, might in fact gain. Realistically there’s only a few kilometers where aero would come into play as a protected rider. My bet is to have more grip for Pogio descent.

I don't think the WT teams are debating this.

this lol

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The entire event (IM) is like "death by 1000 cuts" and the best race is minimizing all those cuts and losing less blood than the other guy. - Dev

^^^^^This.

WVA averaged over 40kph on the Poggio, so no need for a small ring there. Probably only needed the back 1/2 of his cassette to save the legs on the Turchino.

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ECMGN Therapy Silicon Valley:
Depression, Neurocognitive problems, Dementias (Testing and Evaluation), Trauma and PTSD, Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI)

It's too bad he had to use that SRAM garbage.

Surely the Sram marketing team deployed an effective strategy here. In the end WVA ‘only’ needed to descend and out sprint Ganna for second. I wonder how a better aero pairing or less drivetrain friction would have any impact on the result.

That setup would have excess drivetrain friction in two scenarios, crosschained to the largest or next largest cog, or in the smallest (10t) cog. He very likely never did the first, most likely never even used the 4th cog; and would only use the 10 for the sprint. It wasn't the increased drag from the 10t that caused him to sit down mid-sprint.

Cross-chaining has surprisingly low loss and more than outweighed by large to large chainring-sprocket use (in a double),

Surprisingly, 1X has more drivetrain frictional losses than 2X: https://www.velonews.com/...-and-2x-drivetrains/

Don't you miss the days Rappstar would post stuff like this

https://rappstar.com/...x-friction-profiles/

Marginal Gains podcast. Go to 55min or so.
https://marginalgainspodcast.libsyn.com/aja-28-when-are-2x-drivetrains-not-worth-aero-chainline-and-aero-costs


Aero is a wash between 1x and 2x, especially in road racing where you draft a lot.


Does losing a couple watts due to chain friction when pushing over 1200 watts in sprint matter? I highly doubt it.


But maybe that marginal friction cost of 1x over the longest race of the year made a difference? Possibly.