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FEA is fine and dandy (and is really useful for designing/testing parts) but it's only valid if you have perfectly defined all forces involved, and I don't mean rough estimates of forces. If you want a meaningful FEA result, you need to know every force on that wheel that it will ever experience. Static loads, impulses from bumps, side loading from lean angle, everything. Miss one force or get one magnitude wrong and your margin of error is suddenly larger than your fudge factor for safety. On the other hand, you may have just required an insanely high safety factor that makes anchors out of your wheels.
You can do FEA until you're blue in the face, but if you aren't the master of what that wheel experiences, you're just pissing in the ocean. It's not like the computer magically spits out the right numbers.
Matt, I don't know your background. You seem to have a solid handle on racebike and suspension setup, but I have no idea what your experience with FEA is, so please pardon me if I'm out of line.
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