1mm of wax penetration? Keep dreaming! at risk of sounding
non-scientific (!) I can "feel" how deep the wax goes when I'm metal
scraping good base material. I'd say we're talking about several
hundredths of a mm - probably not even 0.1mm.

In fact, I believe that Toko (and probably other wax companies) have
done actual scientific tests to determine how deeply wax saturates the
base. I'm sure Ian Harvey would be happy to comment. Or you could try
looking up the Toko Tech Manual which is actually a fairly useful
document. Plenty of propaganda, but also plenty of good information.

There is no state of the art of glide testing on the world cup. Speed
traps are used, but everybody recognizes their limitations. The major
issue with glide testing on the world cup is that there is very little
opportunity for controlled bench-mark testing because most of the
process is geared toward race skis. It's a question to coordinating the
confluence of lots of different variable, the most important in most
cases being ski selection. The skis really have to be skied for feel.

Anyway, Kuzmin has used accepted ski testing methodology. No problems
there. But by the same token his data is pretty thin, and most people
with experience running speed traps would want to see much more.

Z