Originally Posted by bumpstop

Against my better judgement, I'll offer my newbie post on this topic... Having considered the question myself, I plotted the data from rouesartisanales.com into a spreadsheet and fitted a simple 2nd order polynomial regression line to the data (rim depth vs drag). It shows that rim depth, taken by itself, accounts for 70.6% of the variability in drag observed among the wheels tested. Looking at the way the points plot out, you can then simply see that most of the rest of the variability is due to spoke count (i.e. wheels with greater N of spokes have slightly higher drag, those with lower spoke count, lower drag, for a given rim depth). 70% of course isn't like a 'open and shut case' but you can reasonably conclude that the greater the rim depth, the more 'aero' the wheel, spoke count notwithstanding. So, spoke count taken by itself accounts for 20% of the variability in wheel drag, excluding all other factors, and again, only for those wheels tested by rouesartisanales.com. Draw your own conclusions! I don't own Soul or any other aero wheel (yet) for what its worth.