aliasfox thanks for your gentle and thoughtful reply. My apologies for quoting your post to argue with another member.

I am left with trying to model how a simple statement relying on the physics involved can get so much pushback on a cycling forum. My guess that it involves a lack of experience (either with disparate wheel weights, or mass-start competition cycling), or a mis-understanding of the measuring or modeling involved (especially involving simplifying assumptions), or simply internet feral-pack behavior (not meaning yours!).

My free advice to modelers of mass-start competition (has anyone done that?) would be to simplifyingly ignore any notion of the energy being 'returned' to a competitor because of the 'flywheel effect'. Unless you can store it up in an actual flywheel to be released when wanted, it is effectively lost and gone forever. There is another cyclist on here who regularly points this out and just as regularly gets attacked for it, but he's right, and the internet-learnin' silliness that follows, some of which is very condescending and mean-spirited, is dismaying to behold. (Again, not yours, thankfully!)

Heavy wheels feel sluggish because they are! Trust your senses, everybody.