that is a long time riding alone and you can loose a lot of time.
If that picture is a road bike on the jungle loop then everything is explained.
You road a road bike on the jungle loop, how much of the race was on that? Youâre going to need a lot of watts to keep that up. And 8-10km on your own is a lot of time in the wind (to use a IRL term that doesnât transfer well, but still sounds better than âin the airâ).
When you say you donât âsee much differenceâ, you wonât see/feel/hear any difference, the group will just be rumbling along a lot faster but it will be largely imperceptible.
In that picture youâre doing just 20kph with a not too shabby 323 watts. If you were on a MTB in a draft you would be going a LOT faster
the route was dust in the wind which is 52km mainly asphalt, with 570m climbing so the lightweight road bike was the choice for almost all.
Ok so the bike is a wash then, but the draft is still what did it. Only way to really âperceiveâ the draft is to get dropped by a big group and still have another big group behind you who catch you. The rate they catch you and fly through you will tell you everything
A road bike on a lap of the jungle is a couple of minutes slower than a MTB. A lot of the other riders will have switched to MTB at the start of the jungle, then switched back at the end. Even accounting for changing time (which isnât much if youâre good at it, and if you know to use the Pairing screen to slam the brakes on), youâll have lost time staying on the road bike.