But to believe that knockoffs provide 99% of the performance is to believe that the entire wheel manufacturing business, a business that employs very smart engineers who work very hard to improve performance, reliability, and aerodynamics, is a scam. I believe that is simply not the case.
I don’t know about this. Regular pulley wheels in your derailleur provide 99% of the frictional performance of the CeramicSpeed option, and the price discrepancy is massive. That doesn’t make CeramicSpeed a scam, because the information is knowable.
Your testing notwithstanding, the other false choice here is Zipp/Enve vs. China crap. There is a middle ground out there in Williams/Irwin and others in that $1200 price range. How many grams of drag am I losing in the Zipp 808 vs. William 8x mm wheel? 20? 200? I would guess the former. I don’t know how we are defining 99% (relative to what baseline) but if we’re talking about 20 grams relative to a baseline of the entire drag of your wheels, we’re in the high 90s, for sure.
Opening a can of worms here, but you have been around a lot of wheels…
Racing Chattanooga full in a month. My race wheels have been a set of Chinese 88mm V section wheels. I have raced on these a bunch, and they have felt good. Still true after close to 1000 mi on them.
I also have a set of Bontrager Aeolus 6.5 that currently sit on my roadie. They are lighter for sure, but do you think there will be an appreciable difference in aero? In your experience are a name brand wheel that much better that a shallower rim gives similar performance to a deep rim from a knock off mold?
I have been debating this internally all summer… the Chinese wheels are nude carbon, and so is my bike, and they look REALLY good together, but do you think I’m sacrificing performance there?
And in my limited experience, we tested a Chinese Zipp knockoff (40 to 50-ish mm depth) in the wind tunnel and found it performed worse than even stock options such as the Mavic Aksium.
I’m going to call bullshit on that.
And in my limited experience, we tested a Chinese Zipp knockoff (40 to 50-ish mm depth) in the wind tunnel and found it performed worse than even stock options such as the Mavic Aksium.
I’m going to call bullshit on that.Call it whatever you like. We paid our way to the Texas A&M wind tunnel a few years ago and did our own testing. We learned a lot. It was expensive. John Cobb went with us to show us the ropes. Here’s a look at our trip if you’d like to at least validate we went:
Our testing wasn’t scientific (although our wheel testing was the best controlled testing we did) so the data isn’t suitable for publication. But we did try to do some analysis and here’s what we found with Zipp 404 vs Stock Wheels vs the chinese wheels we used on a Felt IA (integrated cockpit) with no rider:
This data should be taken with a grain of salt, and we had ZERO expectations about how the chinese wheels would perform. We didn’t control for tires. We didn’t get multiple data sets to validate a run. The entire purpose of our trip was educational.
We expected to get performance somewhere nearer the Zipps than the stock wheels, but our findings were the opposite. The knockoffs performed virtually identical to the stock wheels.
I think trentnix comment is legit. This is my n=1 experience… I bought a set of wheels on ebay thinking they were genuine. They were Chinese knock-offs. But they looked great. I mean, they looked and felt completely real. Like someone mentioned, customer service is “no thing”. I had a hard time returning them, so I decided to keep them. Now I have ridden them over 10k miles. They still look great! I’ve hit many potholes - some very bad. They don’t appear to be compromised. But like trentnix said - just because the wheels are working doesn’t mean they’re 99% functional relative to a premier wheel. I’m a heavy guy (185 lbs) and I have noticed that the rims flex causing brake rub when I really power up hills. Well, that kinda sucks.
Now… were the wheels worth $400? Absolutely.
Would I buy another set for $400? Probably not.
You never know what you’re going to get with Chinese wheels. In fact, when the time came, I DID NOT buy another set of Chinese. Instead got some FLO wheels and I love them as well! They seem really fast and don’t have that little bit of extra flex like the Chinese ones. So yeah, to trentnix’s point. Just because they don’t blow up doesn’t mean that they were “worth it”. There are other factors that are difficult to measure.
I have ridden my Ican’s for thousands of miles. I trained for my ironman on them, I raced them on a sprint, an olympic, a half and a full Ironman. I recently did my first road race on a mixed set of Ican’s (50 in front, 86 on rear). I’m doing a TT tomorrow on my 86’s. I’ve hit some massive potholes on spirited rides, hard impacts at well over 20mph. One time I hit a a square edged hole so hard that I thought I cracked the rim or the frame. My LBS checked 'em out and saw no damage. I’m considering doing an Ultraman (yes, I’m scared) and plan on using the Ican’s on the 250+ bike course. I have 0 regrets on either purchase, the 50’s and the 86’s. I’m considering their MTB XC set for my 29r.
