No, that Zipp page is just explaining how they feel their current wheels line up against their previous wheels but not being the same design. They hardly can say anything else, can they? Since they went all in on hookless. It is a page of a lot of marketing bs.
My question is, is it impossible to create those same mentioned benefits on hooked wheels?
It seems to me really nobody can explain to me/us;
hey, the thing we did with this hookless wheel tech is so unique to being exclusively possible to create only with hookless because of this…or that…which is impossible to create on a wheel that is built hooked. We tried, but here you have the tests, we built this wheel or wheels hookles and hooked, but testing between both showed this…with hookless and we weren’t able to replicate this on the hooked version.
That is something nobody seems to be able to answer.
And still it isn’t that to difficult of a question, is it?
Jeroen
Well said, everything Dan points out for hook less sounds like politician speak, doesn’t make a lot of sense but just ‘trust me’.
There is no way something wider can create less drag than something skinnier. So it comes back to rolling resistance and comfort. If a 25 has basically the same RR as a 28 then…is all this just for comfort?
The benifits should be clear cut, not like one of those old 3d eye tricks where if you stare at it cross-eyed for long enough the picture pops out.
It’s not even a comfort question. Wider tires and skinnier tires can have the same compliance if pressures are adjusted accordingly (narrower lower), and now people run tubeless so pinch flats aren’t much of an issue.
You might say there’s a larger volume of air in the wider tire so the pressure doesn’t ramp up as much when you hit large bumps. However hitting a flat section of road so hard that the tire deforms completely to the rim only results in a 6% loss of volume, or a 6% pressure spike. So that’s not substantial either.
As it doesn’t seem that wire tires offers lower CRR on decent roads. As it stands, as far as I can see the only benefit from wider tires is increased grip with similar CRR, comfort, and worse aero. Grip isn’t terribly important considering people are very rarely taking tires to their grip limit.