No, but apparently they help Tadej jump!
Primoz. 
Even if it had springs in them it would be a HUGE JOKE!!!
Oops! 
Meh…hard to keep those Slovenians straight.
So I have the Ares 1 and the tech is the exact same. Specalized have had varus wedges, insoles and metatarsal bumps for at least 10 years (they also say Retul scans everytime they make a shoe). I find varus wedges suit me so I like them, not everyone does though.
And it is a shame as the Ares 2 should be a good shoe, wide toe box but able to be tightened up at the heel and the top of the foot without being uncomfortable. It is exactly what I want from a shoe. We don’t need this hyperbolic marketing and ridiculous price though. It’s just a better fitting Torch (having not tried them on yet so I could be wrong). At least a white paper would be nice.
I still haven’t stopped laughing at “Specialized clarifies that the wattage gain (presumably over the previous Ares shoe) is due to “improved lactate threshold” because the shoes have better footbeds, cleat position and internal wedges.” (bolding is mine)
No that’s not what Im saying. You can measure the deflection of the shoe sole using a strain meter and also measure the force output with the power meter pedals they already have. From that you can calculate the hysteresis of the shoe sole and subsequently power loss. You don’t need to measure force input into the shoe so you can have any rider do this (no fake leg or foot). Thats the advantage with my proposal.
Measuring O2 consumption is too indirect to get better than a couple watts ( double digits seems more likely). And temp rise is tough to control for outside influences. There is a reason power meters dont measure temp rise to determine power output.
Overall this is an interesting problem and having a method that can give quantitative results is a fun challenge.
Your proposal boils down to using two power meters (not a criticism, just saying). When you measure the deflection of the sole, you could also infer the force applied to it. For small deflections the relation between strain and stress is linear. It’d be trickier as Young’s modulus will depend on the location on the sole, etc.
Independently of how you do it, I reckon this problem will be very hard in practical terms as I expect the losses to be very small. Ordinary power meters have an accuracy of 1–2 %, which limits what effects you can actually measure.
The losses should be small. Does anyone know? But irregardless, carbon soles provide stability and incredible support. For people that put out smaller watts, no massive regular peaks, a plastic or nylon shoe is probably going to be fine (if they don’t flex the sole/shoe).
I, when I posted their video, thought they could be using it to influence the high end shoe market. By declaring ‘they were the same’, many buyers could/would be dissuaded from buying higher end (carbon) shoes. Why GCN would be trying to influence the shoe market is a topic of interest on its own. If people are buying carbon shoes to ‘look pro’, they are possibly wasting their money. Why would GCN care. How could GCN, and their hired lab, totally miss the idea that they were not measuring REALITY, that they were not even close to proving anything. It couldn’t look worse for GCN, their journalists, and their management. How did this happen, and what were they hoping to influence by releasing it. A post mortem would help… 
That and in my experience they do a better job at avoiding hotspots. That’s a comfort thing, and as such could lead to better performance. But then the argument would be more comfortable shoe ==> better performance, but since stiffer ≠ more comfortable, it still wouldn’t work.
Maybe they got caught in a corner. Typically, they do advertainment/infotainment stuff, i. e. they have a sponsor with new product X and they should make an entertaining video about it. Perhaps Pirelli sponsors a video and wants them to showcase their new 40 mm road tires. So they do a test where they “scientifically” compare how fast/slow the 30 mm, 35 mm and 40 mm versions are. It doesn’t matter which tire wins as long as Pirelli tires are featured.
Now they have tried to something really scientific and the expectation they set themselves is that the comparison should be scientific. Only to find out that this requires much more thought, care and capability than GCN had at its disposal.
The weird bit is that no one working at the wind tunnel at Silverstone , which you’d think might require a physics degree, noticed they were totally wasting their time 
But maybe they did, and either didn’t bring it up (horrible for them), or were ignored by GCN (horrible for them). There is enough to go around to embarrass everyone, but in the end the facility they used could just say ‘We warned them, and they wanted to continue’.
Running a business, I remember when our accountant inserted a disclaimer (CTA) note that the data used in these included documents are derived from information provided by our client. We make no representation to their accuracy’. But, um, they combed through our records every quarter. If there was anything wrong, they would have discovered it I’m sure. So if they thought they could hide behind that statement, it’s not at all likely to stick. Sure, ‘garbage in, garbage out’ but they went through the container and pulled it all out. But anyway…
This has been, on one level, rather hysterical. And it took them how long to retract it?
Party on!!
Just my 2c on this topic :
-
I use carbon soles because of comfort. Plastic soles give me hotspots both in XC and road setups. For power losses to occur one would have to effectively compress the sole material (I just don’t see this happening) or cause some bending of the sole when pedaling (ok, maybe if one uses a very rearward cleat position, bridging between the ball of the foot and the heel).
-
I have very low expectations for GCN “tests”, but, like others mentioned, my biggest question mark here is how Silverstone let this one go through. They either didn’t spot the protocol error (awful), or didn’t care at all about what GCN was doing and provided no guidance (bad) or knew about the problem but still let GCN publish their content (bad). I don’t see any scenario in which Silverstone comes out of this in good light.
-
because some people were mentioning AI here, just for fun I suggested to ChatGPT their test protocol and their objective. The systems first answer to the prompt was positive. With a second prompt I questioned it if the protocol would indeed work since the first power meter was after the sole. ChatGPT proceeded to give me a comprehensive answer on how that wouldn’t work and suggested some different test setups. So AI is not really there yet but very close
I like GCN, and I really miss GCN+, but their notion of “testing” is laughable. It’s a shame, because they do tackle some interesting questions. With only a tiny bit more effort, they could be providing some useful information.
Yeah, it’s bad enough now that if people put them in charge of anything that can hurt people, there will be people getting hurt. The early AI generated images were some level far removed from laughable. What’s worse than horrific?
The problem with AI is that there are people that are so out there, they will ride AI into a wall, turn it around, and keep going, and that’s the problem. Stephen Hawking was right, AI IS a clear and present danger to humanity because most of the people that seem so dead set that it is THE answer are so ‘damaged’, and could be argued aren’t really human, or humane. shrug And like programming in general, the product is only as good as the people that created and ‘taught’ it. If you aren’t at least concerned about AI displacing human beings yet, just wait.
And there already is a company named SkyNet. They aren’t in AI. Yet… 
No, Im not saying to build a power meter into the shoe. If you simply measure sole deflection and have an accurate pedal power meter then you can get the hysteresis value of the sole and calculate power loss. You dont need to worry about the material of the sole, youngs modulus, etc. You also get a direct value of sole deflection which is interesting on its own. An analogy would be using a ruler to measure the deflection of a coil spring. In this analogy you put a scale on the output of that spring ((pedal power meter). So even though the force input into the spring is unknown, you can still calculate the power losses in the spring.
Can you provide more details? (I have a background in physics, so no worries to use formulas.)
I think I understand your point in a static situation, then you can compare the deflection to the measured force at the power meter pedals. But I don’t understand how that’d work in a dynamic situation, because the static picture neglects (and can neglect) kinetic energy.
Wouldn’t an energy balance work better and more reliably?
All springs behave according to Hookes Law which is F=kx where F is force, k is your spring constant and x is spring displacement. Normal high school physics right. The sole of the shoe is also a spring and follows Hookes Law. But in a shoe, the spring isnt a coil but just bending like a leaf spring. In a perfect world it wont matter how springy your sole is as all the energy is perfectly returned. But in our case the spring isnt perfect and there are losses. So as you deflect the spring you will measure its bending (x). You will also measure the force coming out of the spring (F) (powermeter pedal). You will plot that force against the bending. In that perfect world this is a straight line but because of the losses in the spring you will get a slightly different line during compression and expansion of that spring. The difference between those compression and expansion lines is your losses.