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Comment by jartelt | Hacker News Reader

Being 3 or 4% more efficient on race day is a HUGE advantage. Maybe not every elite runner wants to have to wear these shoes to compete?

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In cycling people are risking lifetime bans to get a 5 or 8% power advantage. Which is doubly amazing because speed goes up with the square root of power due to drag. I’d wager that 3% for a runner is a bigger deal than 6% for a cyclist.

Drag doesn't matter as much at higher levels of cycling, because teams will draft off one another to save energy.

Shaved legs provide a small advantage in the Tour de France.

Not in the breakaways, which is where races are won.

or time trials or climbing

Then they will have to find shoes which are competitive, doesn't seem that crazy to me. It'd be great if footraces continued to advance consumer shoes like stock car racing advances consumer vehicles.

Not a very good example, stock cars are effectively ancient in many ways compared to modern cars. For example they only started playing with (indirect) fuel injection a few years ago.

Aren't stock cars literally by definition modern cars? They're cars currently available in the stock of consumer retailers. That's the whole point of the game isn't it?

some time ago stock car racing was just that, but these days the types of cars manufacturers run in stock car racing are purpose built race machines that have only a passing superficial relationship to what you can find at a dealer.

Stock car racing's history traces to Prohibition era moonshiners. They had to upgrade their cars to get away from authorities but had to do so without raising suspicion. NASCAR races can be in excess of 200 miles per hour when race track conditions allow it which only extremely high end sportscars can do (NASCAR engines are up to 900 horsepower).

By definition, they are cars that look like they're consumer cars but inside they're made to be powerful racing vehicles.

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