I haven't cleaned a chain in 10 years.

Your drivetrain is the one system on the bike where you can buy a genuine, laboratory-verified improvement for less than the price of a decent pair of bib shorts. Most riders still degrease, re-oil, and hand the difference straight back every single ride. That's the bit that annoys people when you say it out loud.

I stopped oiling chains a decade ago. What follows is why, with the numbers that convinced me, and the honest reasons you might still decide it isn't worth your Sunday evening.

The number that starts the argument

Zero Friction Cycling in Adelaide run the most bloody-minded drivetrain testing in the sport. They measure chains on a rig, then contaminate them with a standardised grit slurry and just keep measuring, out to 6,000 kilometres of simulated filth. That second part is the bit that matters, because a chain in a laboratory isn't a chain on a Sussex lane in February.

Call it three watts on a good day against a mediocre oil. Which sounds like nothing, and honestly, on its own, it is nothing. That's rather the point of marginal gains. Nobody ever won anything with one of them, and nobody serious hands one back either.

Put three watts against a real effort, though. Sa Calobra is 9.4 kilometres at seven per cent. Hold 300 watts up it and three watts of recovered drivetrain loss is worth roughly eighteen seconds. I went 29:53 on that climb. Read that number again, then tell me eighteen seconds isn't worth a pot of wax.

The number that ends it

Friction gets the headline, but the number that quietly pays your mortgage is wear.

An oiled chain is a fly trap. The oil sits wet on the surface, collects the grit thrown up by every wet road, and then that grit gets dragged through the rollers a hundred times a minute. You're lapping your own transmission with a fine abrasive paste, which is not exactly ideal. Wax doesn't do that, because wax is dry. Grit lands on it and falls off, or sits there inert on a hard surface instead of suspending itself in a lubricant.

The consequence shows up fastest in the wet. Friction Facts, reported through VeloNews, found waxed chains running close to six watts faster than oiled ones after just one hour in contaminated conditions. Not day one in a clean lab. One hour of exactly the riding most of us do all winter.

What it actually costs

Right, this is where the honesty has to arrive, because the entry fee isn't trivial and the internet is quite full of people pretending it is.

One hundred and eighty nine quid to start. That's a real number and I'm not going to dress it up.

Then the running cost. A dip uses 30 to 50 pence of wax. A drip top-up is 60 pence to a pound. Amortise the kit over a couple of seasons and you're adding something like 70 pence a session. Call it one to two pounds per service, every 300 to 500 kilometres.

Against that, put the drivetrain you're no longer quietly destroying. If you're running a premium groupset and covering serious distance, the difference between replacing cassettes and chainrings at the oiled rate and at the waxed rate runs into four figures over ten thousand kilometres. So the wax pays for itself long before it makes you faster, which is, I think, a strange thing to be able to say about a performance product.

The part nobody mentions: you stop maintaining your bike

I said I haven't cleaned a chain in 10 years, and I meant it literally. There's no degreaser in my garage, and no fortnightly ritual of scrubbing a cassette with a toothbrush and swearing at it. (There's a bloke on my club run who does exactly that, every Saturday, and still tells me waxing sounds like a faff. He also half-wheels me all the way to the village sign, so take his advice as you find it.)

The waxed routine is this. Wipe the chain. Drop it in the pot. Take it out. That's the whole job, and it happens every 300 to 500 kilometres rather than after every wet ride. Modern chip products deal with the factory grease too, so you're not stood over a tray of solvent just to get started.

For a rider with eight hours a week, that's not a small thing. Every hour you're not maintaining a bike is an hour you can ride it, or an hour you can hand back to the people who tolerate your riding. Marginal gains usually get sold as speed, but this one mostly buys back time, and time is the thing you're actually short of.

Where I've proved it

Manchester to London, 2016. Complete washout. Six hours of it on my own, in the kind of rain that finds its way into your shoes inside twenty minutes. Waxed chain, and it was still running clean at the end of a day that would have turned an oiled one into grinding paste.

Manchester to London, 2017. Course record, 11:43:10. That was the year I was also working on the broadcast of Sir Bradley Wiggins' Hour Record, which is probably where most of this thinking comes from. Nobody at that level hands back three watts because cleaning a chain is a habit.

Manchester to London, 2022. My fastest time on the route, on the full system, and by then I wasn't thinking about the chain at all.

And Sa Calobra, 29:53, on a waxed chain. Seven seconds inside a target that had already beaten me twice. I'm not going to claim the wax bought me those seven seconds. I'll just point out that I wouldn't have had them to spend if I'd given eighteen away at the bottom.

The honest caveats

Two things you should know about me before you take any of this as gospel.

First, I spent a decade inside professional cycling as a creative director at Sky Sports and Team Sky. My instincts on marginal gains were formed in a room where this stuff was basically religion, and that's a bias as much as it is an education. (Yes, I've heard all the jokes about the mattresses. One or two of them are mine.)

Second, I'm a SILCA ambassador. The products I've named are the ones I use, and I'd tell you if they'd let me down, but you're entitled to weigh the disclosure. Every number above comes from an independent laboratory rather than a brand's marketing deck, and I've named the sources so you can go and argue with them instead of me.

The real argument against waxing is the setup cost and the batching, not the performance, and both of those are fair. If you own one bike, ride two hours a week, and the chain lives on a turbo in a spare room, oil is fine, and you should spend the £189 on something that'll make more difference to you than eighteen seconds up a climb you're not riding. Buy the fan.

The actual doctrine

What a decade around this actually taught me isn't really about chains.

The wax is just what happened when I decided, once, to stop accepting a default. The default is oil because your first bike shop used oil. The default is 100psi because that's what the sidewall says. The default is training on feel because that's what everyone at the club does. Nobody tested any of them for you. They just stuck.

The riders who get faster tend to be the ones who go through those defaults one at a time and keep whatever's still standing afterwards. Three watts here. Ten watts in your tyres. An hour of sleep. Forty grams of carbohydrate before you feel like you need them. Deep wheels come a long way down that list, whatever the marketing says. I might have the order of it wrong, mind you.

So which default are you auditing first? Mine was the chain, mostly because it was the cheapest thing to be wrong about. The bloke with the toothbrush is still on 100psi, and still beats me to the village sign. Sod's law.

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