"Taking an ounce off your wheels is liking taking two ounces off anywhere else on your bike." "Start by getting light weight wheels, makes a huge difference in acceleration." These are are near-universal beliefs.

Those of you who recently spent $1500 on a wheelset to eliminate a few grams and are convinced your bike was radically transformed might not want to try the following experiment:

Prop up the front of your bike or put it on a stand and watch your speedometer while you grab the front wheel and give it a spin. If you want to get it up to the 20s you will probably have to yank on the spokes near the hub. Of course the effort to spin up the wheels is x2 of that, but its still really trivial -- you can do it with two fingers of one hand. At least I could, and that is with a $189 wheelset with 700 x 32 tires. You could also put your bike in its hardest gear and you will find that it takes little effort to get the rear wheel up to top speed with one hand. And that is bringing the wheel from standstill to max rpms much faster than occurs in any actual riding conditions. Unless you have a handcycle in your fleet you probably have far more strength in your legs than in your arms.

The effort to overcome the inertia of the wheels is a fart in a hurricane compared to what it takes to overcome the inertia of getting combined bike and rider mass up to speed, let alone to move that mass from elevation A up to elevation B. If you are racing its true that grams, seconds or fractions of seconds count, of course, but the difference from ultralight wheels is much less than it is commonly made out to be.

Don in Austin