carpediemracing 

I understand the math about accelerating. I spent a lot of time on the analytic cycling site putting numbers into different boxes, both before and after buying the Jet wheels. One thing that no one understands is how badly I wanted the Jets to work.

However the big weakness is that the site doesn't take into account the need to respond to other riders' actions.

So... in a TT will weight make a big difference? No, not really. In fact early disk wheels had spots for weights to increase moment of inertia. If I could time trial I'd be thinking about Jets for that.

In a mass start race, where drafting is exponentially more significant than weight, it makes a huge, huge difference. If you're trying to accelerating 3-4x every 60-90 seconds to stay within a very specific area behind other riders it's harder with an extra kilo of weight on your rims/tires. It's the whole "you can save energy by accelerating much less out of a corner but then you'll use all that energy and more time trialing behind the field" thing.

If you solo off the front then the weight effect is kind of gone again because you're simply doing a steady state time trial type effort. However that's not normally in my realm. I tried a few times last year, a couple times actually thinking about it beforehand, and I'll say that weight didn't matter and aero was all important.

One thing to consider is that I have no room for waste. I'm trying to average in the 155-195 watt range for a crit, meaning that's about all I can do. I'm trying to average 155-195, not limit myself to 155-195 watts. Right now I can't go beyond that; in races where my average was close to 195 I was struggling to stay in touch (and that power number I think is too high - I haven't calibrated my second SRM spider yet). In one race this year I placed at 153 watts (same course, basically same competitors). I was shelled in another race after holding 275 watts for a bit... no way I could do that for an hour.

I no longer have the headroom to do a bunch of 1000-1200 watt spikes to stay on wheels. In fact, in my earlier post where I mention hitting 1250 watts in a corner, I actually hit the number with 3 turns to go in a (p123) crit and I was drifting back a bit in that turn. I blew myself up accelerating out of the turn and couldn't sprint in that race. I didn't even make it to the next turn without blowing up.

I'm not good at math/physics so I won't try to figure out an equation that takes into account drafting but that's what's necessary to illustrate this. If someone jumps hard (like if they're attacking or it's a hard turn) then how hard do you have to jump to stay in the draft. Your power requirements would go up as you drop out of the sheltered spot, and the faster you go the worse the effect would be.

Other factors include rider type (I am more fast twitch than not, I have no aerobic capacity) and things like amount of wind, size of rider in front (too tall is just as bad as too short, at least for me), how close one can ride to the next rider (I am good at riding pretty closely), etc.