What I wonder about aero handlebars is how much you can shrink that 6%, compared to other aero gear. For example, if the front wheel has only half the contribution to total drag as the handlebar, but if you can get triple the improvement from an aero front wheel, the front wheel starts to look like it might be a better investment. I highly doubt that this is true, but I hope you see my point. If the handlebar is 6% of total drag, but the best aero bar in the world can only save you 1 watt over the worst, it's probably not worth $400. Like I said, I don't think that's true, it's probably more than that.

The other thing about handlebars, which I sort of mentioned earlier, is there's a significant interaction between the bar and bike fit. Which is why the Enve bar is interesting to me. My naive assumption is that the fancy airfoil shapes on the tops and, in some cases, the drops, matter less than being able to get into a more aerodynamic position. So you're potentially moving the needle a lot just by interacting with the handlebar differently even if it's not necessarily "aero." Building a flared bar like the Enve SES strikes me as a very smart approach, and it suggests that you could spend way less money on a more conventional flared bar to and get at least some of the same kind of improvement.