Aero Wheel Upgrade

In general, the biggest determining factor of aero wheels is the depth of the rim regardless of profile/shape. The shape can marginally help with crosswind stability up to a certain point and there are other quality of life factors you should consider (such as ride comfort, stiffness, braking performance for rim-brakes, quality of hubs used, warranty, etc), but depth is king in aero. Do not buy into marketing hype when it comes to some of these outrageously priced rims.

The one exception of this is FLO wheels which actually test really slowly for their given depth in real-world scenarios. They are inherently flawed in design–their data is based on ideal, stead-state wind tunnel analysis which is inapplicable in the majority of real life scenarios. In fact, most manufacturers and marketing data are designed around this solely because there are only a few wind tunnels in the world that can actually test with transient analysis (recording the effect of ramping yaw angles rather than a constant single angle at a time). Even in ideal conditions (indoors), what isn’t accounted for is that a rider naturally induces yaw into the system by subtly rocking the bike as they pedal, so you can see how this is a fundamental problem when a wheel is designed to be fast at “0 degrees” and nothing else.

You can read more about this independent study and see their wheel comparisons/testings here, it’s caused quite a stir recently:

FLO has acknowledged these findings but haven’t really been able to counter it. It will be interesting to see if they try to address this in their next generation of rim designs.

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