Originally Posted by
Brian Ratliff
Change your frame of thinking. No, they are not racing. They are doctors. BUT, they aspire to ride like the racers they admire. These purchases are aspirational. Aspirational; not practical, not showoff. These people train like racers (or as much as possible given the limits of their time and energy). They only don't race because they make money with body parts that sometimes get maimed in bike crashes. Who do you think are the people caring about Strava? These people are racing in so far as they care about the same things racers care about in their equipment purchases.
Also, lots of doctors do actually race. And they race on much cooler bikes than my Engineering salary affords.
How do you know this, that their purchases are "aspirational"? How do you even know that they admire racers? I certainly don't know, but I can see several other motivations.
Consider for a moment that your assumption (let's call a spade a spade) is wrong. Suppose the reason that they don't race these $6K bikes is because they don't care about races. If they don't care about races, then they don't care about racers and they don't care about potentially finishing third instead of second.
In that case (the more likely case IMO) they bought the bike for other reasons. The commonly expressed other reasons are intangibles (feel), and cachet.