Besides enve and maybe Flo, those are all brands that aren’t super popular amongst the tri or tt community. So it makes sense that they would be targeting more the shallower wheel crowd for road or off road cycling.
Are you losing much by running a 60mm wheel? That’s up to you to decide. To some, they want every last second. To others, they want a wheel that can be used in training and racing across various conditions. Nothing wrong with either decision but a 80mm wheel is going to be faster than a 60mm pretty much always. It’s just up to the individual to decide what best suits their overall needs.
Enve has a 100mm already ridden by pros, Hunt has a 83mm, Lightbicycle has a new 78mm. Didn’t check the others but the first 3 I checked all have a new-gen deep disc model.
First thing I would say is that I am unaware of many/any of the Chinese brands doing actual aero development work and testing, so I would take what they are doing as anything other than filling the biggest needs in the market.
Second point with wind tunnel testing is that nearly all of the tunnels aren’t able to correct or measurer the rotational losses of the spokes. Back in the day there was a great video of a HED Trispoke rotating forward at yaw angle in the 5ish degree range, so there was negative rotational drag component that partially offset the translational drag.
I think if you want to compare wheels it should be done with track testing to account for the difference in rotational drag. A deep wheel has shorter spokes and the speed of the spoke is slower.
So, assuming good profile shapes on a 60 and 90mm deep rims the 90 is going to be a few watts faster and it is likely the 90 is going to be better than a wind tunnel result would suggest. You have to balance that with handling and the additional energy to accelerate the wheel.
I agree with you - it’s just that only a few years ago, you could get 88mm from Chinese companies, nearly all of them (rim-brake generation). Have been surprised that they’ve nearly all disappeared from the Chinese offerings, and now are definitely even more of a niche product in the already niche area of expensive (non-chinese) carbon wheels.
Even today, you can find 88-rim brake models with a lot (?most) of the Chinese companies, but they’re carrying essentially no 88s or up. TONS of offerings in the 40-65 range, though. Was surprising to me given that most of them have a link to ‘triathlon wheels’ on their website, and 88s are no longer there even though I’d presume that would be a popular one for the market of people buying deep carbon wheels for tri.
THen again, with the aero data above, maybe they’ve decided it’s no longer worth going after that market. For sure that aero data above suggesting 88s are only marginally (if even) better than 65s is making me not want the hassle of dealing with the needed valve extenders for 88s, and just sticking with my HED V62s which don’t need extenders since you can get 80mm stem tubes. (Not that I ever had any real problems with my rim brake 88s and extenders on my prior bike.)
Again I’m not saying they don’t exist - I can find them.‘it’s just they dropped from being a typical mainstream offering in the tri wheel dept to a very specialty item not featured asa main product. It’s almost disappeared from Chinese wheel suppliers and is def not a flagship item in any of the other wheelhouses - despite the fact that every provides them in tri in front.
As alluded to above, most of the Chinese wheel suppliers do zero aerodynamic testing, and “R&D” is literally buying the best selling HED/ZIPP/Enve/whatever wheel and copying the rim profile. If none of the big guys are selling a bunch of the deep wheels, the copies aren’t going to get made either.
This is def true, but honest to got my $380 rim-brake Superteams 50s were as fast as my HED V62s that cost 4x as much. The Superteam 88s were even faster yet. Felt like cheating to get that much of a speed gain for so little money. Nowadays 88s are pretty much $1500, if not $1800+.
The ubiquity of disc brakes changed everything for the copy-and-paste wheel manufacturers. Remove all the structural requirements of having a brake track built into a rim, and It’s incredibly easy to just duplicate the profile of known fast wheels, and any deficiencies in your internal design and construction become exponentially less likely to ever become apparent to the end user. Then, since these are just copies of known-good designs, marginal performance differences between the known-good designs are just that, and those margins can always slide either way, based on things like tire choice and frame interaction.
Weirdly, very few of the Chinese manufacturers or less-boutique ones are even bothering to make 88s even though it should be easier than making the rim versions.
I suspect for AGers in tri, all the wheels are essentially the same in performance for given depth. I’d say differently for criteriums where there is a LOT of accel/decel, so weight penalties for acceleration are more pronounced. But that’s not an issue in AG triathlon, so even if you have slightly heavier deep wheels, they seem to be pretty darn fast. No way that my HED V62 is outperforming my $350 Superteam wheels. I have a lot of training rides and race data that show plenty of the reverse, actually (which is sort of horrifying to me.) Give me the Superteam 88s, and they’re def a hair faster than HEDV62 (which is a 62mm).
I was just going to buy the disc version 88 of the Superteams, but alas, despite them having like 5 new product lines, no new 88s. To my surprise. Most of the other ones either also don’t carry or it’s a special order. I’m hesitant to drop $2k on a boutique set given it’s almost certainly barely any faster than my HEDV62s, though.
This isn’t weird at all. Very few people are interested in buying wheels of that depth, and they can’t copy designs that the major manufacturers aren’t selling, either.
The math on this has been posted on this forum many, many times and it still comes out the same as it ever did: the rates of acceleration in cycling are so low that this essentially never amounts to any statistically significant disadvantage for a deeper section wheel.
Really? I’ve seen ‘tests’ online that show that in technical courses with lots of accels/decels, the deeper rim wheel won’t necessarily win against a shallow rim wheel, for those reasons.
If it was such, why wouldn’t every criterium and pro rider always use the deepest wheels possible? (Like 88s until the recent ban on them in some road racing)
Again, I’m talking crits/road racing, NOT steady-state triathlon where I said above the weight is basically irrelevant with deep wheels on triathlon courses , which tend not to have monster climbs.
I haven’t ever seen an actual test with a sound methodology that did so.
As to “why”, the answer should be pretty clear; people believe that deeper section wheels are a disadvantage.
It’s funny just how completely this swings the other way in track racing, where the advantages of disc and deep wheels are unquestioned, and it is (not unrelatedly) much easier to tease the performance differences out of the noise.
And how much time is given up with minute readjustments of the handlebars to continue a straight line with wind coming in from an angle as most winds do
No way this is true at pro cycling. They test everything. I’m not buying that they didn’t run 88s on their road bikes because they ‘believed’ they were slower.
You very much overestimate the degree to which pro cycling “tests everything” and even more so the degree to which this influences equipment decisions. Also, pro teams - at the level that actually do test, and can afford to base equipment decisions on test data - don’t do crits. There is no question that wheel mass moves the dial when climbing, but that wasn’t what we were talking about.