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Myths in cycling: wider tires are slower

renehersecycles.com

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Re: Myths in cycling: wider tires are slower

#241

Post by audiometry »

jmilloy wrote: post #213
MarkusWandel wrote: post #101

Cheap tires are slower. Reliable tires are slower. It's obvious from the pictures that the fatties they're testing are special, with paper thin skinwalls. I can totally see that a high performance fattie would be just as good as a high performance narrow tire. It's the inelastic deformation of the tire casing (and inner tube) that eats power. Unfortunately thin-walled high performance tires are also delicate. I've se…

Yeah, these supple tires are faster but less delicate than you think. I do think replacing your stock tire with a supple tire at the same width will be a huge upgrade, and wider would just give you a little bit more.

The problem I’ve experienced with these expensive tires (compass, gran bois, etc) isn’t their durability against road debris. It’s that their “supple” sidewalls don’t hold up to the equatorial sun I suffer under. They degrade far faster than the tire rubber degrades. I like riding these tires but they are expensive fast consumables.

Re: Myths in cycling: wider tires are slower

#242

Post by rmoriz »

While this article targets road cycling, from my own casual city cycling experience I strongly recommend wide tires. They forgive much more rider errors and slip less in any case. I personally use 60mm (60-622) Schwalbe Big Apple tires on my 17 year old Utopia Velo steel bike. Make sure the wide tire fits the frame, some city/holland type bikes can only fit some 40ish mm tires.

Re: Myths in cycling: wider tires are slower

#243

Post by soperj »

fsckboy wrote: post #211
soperj wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, go try biking by only pulling up. You don't pull up.

Honestly, I pull up. I'm not pulling the pedal up, I'm lifting the leg and pulling my foot up, getting it into postion to push again, same as I would do for running. you should try it, you can feel the relief in the pushing leg.

I'll go try it. Why couldn't you do that in flats?

Re: Myths in cycling: wider tires are slower

#244

Post by wolrah »

haswell wrote: post #12

This is one of the reasons I love the emergence of the "Gravel" category of bikes. They look and have geometry similar to a road bike, but they have enough clearance for nice fat gravel tires. I ride in Chicago (shitty roads, potholes & construction are everywhere), and love that I can put nice 38mm+ GravelKing Slick tires on the bike, and still have no problem keeping up with most road bikes. I've gotten funny looks…

The second most annoying thing to me about cyclists are the number of them who complain about the quality of the road or path while riding what is more or less a race bike.

Shockingly, road race vehicles of any variety generally are not built for comfort or ability to handle less than ideal conditions. Stop acting like you think you're in the TdF and get a bike that makes sense for where you ride.

Re: Myths in cycling: wider tires are slower

#245

Post by [deleted] »

louthy wrote: post #2

If that were the case, surely Tour de France riders would use wider tyres to gain more grip going around corners, especially in time-trials or stages with sprint finishes. Doesn’t a greater surface area touching the floor means more frictional effects when pushing against the road?

[deleted]

Re: Myths in cycling: wider tires are slower

#246

Post by sirstan »

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #143
jiscariot wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My only complaint about the gravel trend is that at the entry (and mid) level they are often using pretty crappy disc brakes when rim brakes would have been a better choice in 90% of cases. When they are hydraulic, they are a dream to use, but with a cable you really lose the brake feel.

Ha! I only figured it out after buying Kona Rove NRB, which is not even an entry-level bike, but it turned out to have disk brakes and extremely fragile paintwork. It served me well, but I am still somewhat cautious when descending since then.

I’m glad to see another Rove owner mention the paint. I swear wiping sweat off the top tube scrapes through the paint.

Re: Myths in cycling: wider tires are slower

#247

Post by stickfigure »

ultrarunner wrote: post #135
dharmab wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similarly in the motorcycle world, dual sport and adventure models originally designed for on road/off road mix are now quite popular as commuter machines. Their long suspension makes them quite comfortable over potholes, cracks, curbs and generally poor road surfaces. And many models are narrow enough to filter between lanes with ease.

I would argue that "designed for [off] road mix" is pretty charitable. A 500-pound dirt bike with a comfortable seating position wins the tough-aesthetics competition, but off road performance is meager at best. I built decent off-road skills on a DL1000, but the weight was always such a liability as to make it impracticable. I moved to a smaller and lighter bike and have more fun, but 99% of people I met in Arizona…

You'd be surprised. I've taken my 500-pound dirt bike (KTM 990A) to the end of Baja (all dirt), across the Trans America Trail, and to Alaska and back. Did most of the hard splits on LA-Barstow-to-Vegas a few years ago, and endless dirt riding in the Sierras and Nevada. And I'm by no means the best rider I know.

Single track is hard work but there's nothing quite like ripping open the throttle on a 100hp dirt bike and throwing up a tornado of sand. I owned an XR250R for a few years and just found it boring.

Re: Myths in cycling: wider tires are slower

#248

Post by rorykoehler »

haswell wrote: post #12

This is one of the reasons I love the emergence of the "Gravel" category of bikes. They look and have geometry similar to a road bike, but they have enough clearance for nice fat gravel tires. I ride in Chicago (shitty roads, potholes & construction are everywhere), and love that I can put nice 38mm+ GravelKing Slick tires on the bike, and still have no problem keeping up with most road bikes. I've gotten funny looks…

The geometry of gravel bikes is much closer to 90s cross country mountain bikes than modern road bikes.

Re: Myths in cycling: wider tires are slower

#249

Post by baliex »

kazinator wrote: post #145
fsckboy wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're commenting on a article that says "we started to question many of the things we had accepted as ‘facts’... we’ll look at some of these myths. We’ll explain why we (and everybody else) used to believe them, and how things really work" But you aren't qualifying what you're saying: Are you telling us what everybody used to believe? Are you saying you see through what everybody says even without empirical testing?…

> Are you telling us what everybody used to believe? No; pretty much everything in my comment is undisputed old hat, so it is kind of tangential. The main myth is not that any of that is false, but rather than thin tires more than compensate for these effects due to their reduced air drag and weight and so always end up being advantageous anyway. (And they almost certainly are on a polished indoor velodrome track, wh…

Have you read the article? It provides the analysis and evidence for what you’re saying in a (mostly) rigorous way

Re: Myths in cycling: wider tires are slower

#250

Post by rorykoehler »

plorkyeran wrote: post #36
haswell wrote: post #12

This is one of the reasons I love the emergence of the "Gravel" category of bikes. They look and have geometry similar to a road bike, but they have enough clearance for nice fat gravel tires. I ride in Chicago (shitty roads, potholes & construction are everywhere), and love that I can put nice 38mm+ GravelKing Slick tires on the bike, and still have no problem keeping up with most road bikes. I've gotten funny looks…

Yeah, when I first got my gravel bike I thought I'd be sacrificing some road performance for better flexibility and comfort, but that didn't happen. The actual result was that my times on smooth segments were unchanged and I've beaten many of my personal bests on rougher roads (and obviously it's much better on dirt). It's not a perfectly fair comparison because I did upgrade to a nicer bike in the process, but my pr…

Don't gravel bikes have much smaller gear ratios? There is no way a strong road cyclist would have the same times on a gravel bike as a road bike purely due to the size of the front chain ring. I run a semi-compact up front on my road bike and I can't go faster than 53kmh on the flat without my cadence getting too high to sustain for longer periods of time.
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