Narrow vs wide tyres - Bring data

[Alastair2308]

Because there isn't any obvious facts / data / proof outside of affiliated tests / data provided by cycling companies attempting to sell you something. The one test that isnt really affiliated with anyone is Brr and their testing shows that wider tyres aren't faster. So unless you have some actual data outside of the usual marketing claims and outside of yours or anyone else's #trustmebroguarantee it's faster my butt can totally feel it's smoother and faster and grips way better even though I'm not a pro and can't really push the bike to it's limits.

You clearly don't get one important thing. The longer the ride the faster the wider tire will be. You know why? Because of less vibration, which equals to less stress/fatigue on your body. You keep on talking about pros, so I will tell you one more thing. They are way more immune to fatigue then amateurs are. So that's another point why wider are faster also for amateurs. Bro if tadej uses wide you can be sure it's not slowing him down. Even for short tests like here from norcal cycling it's clear which tire is faster.

https://youtu.be/GTKjdTBCw58?si=ncGabxsOcAdzLFgd

And the fact that you "feel" narrow tire is faster has nothing to do with reality. It only shows you are looking at wrong things. You don't feel the speed, you only feel more vibrations, harder ride etc. Which in your head is received as being faster. It's similar to people who set their saddle to high and think they push harder from the top and generate more power, which again isn't tru. Only thing they feel is imbalance because of the Interia in the latter phase of the spin. Again feeling vs data

Your clearly don't get one important thing. Where. Is. Your. Data. Norcals
is great and I love their content but they are still not a lab controlled environment and there are just too many external factors at play to make any conclusions. Because I can also find a you tube video in 5 mins that contradicts Norcals points. SOOO. So we need actual scientific data to form an actual meaningful conclusion.

Where is your data from a reliable third party tester that is proving beyond a doubt that the wider tyre is going to be faster than the narrower one because of vibration. Where is the data? You don't have any.
Because I have contradicting ass data. My giant TCR advanced from 2012 rides on 25s (25WAM) and 17ID wheels rides better than my modern Felt AR on 28WAM and 23ID. But again. Ass data literally means nothing. So just because you are perceiving it doesn't actually there. So who's ass data is right?

Again. If you are going to go down this road of feeling And perception you are utterly wasting your time chasing tyre widths because the tyre width if going to have a negligible difference on perceived comfort. Things that will make a perceptible difference on comfort will be 1. Contact points. And 2. Your wheel build. 3.Frame.
Not all wheels are made equal and the majority of cyclists are riding around on wheels that are wholly inadequate for their use case. Super stiff carbon spoked wheels are going to be doing zero favors in the comfort department. And people are going to be chasing down wider tyres hoping to improve their comfort.

Want to improve comfort and get faster. Build / buy a wheel that is going to suit your use case. A 60kg high performance rider is going to have very different requirements to a 90kg Mamil but everyone buys wheels as though all riders are equal.

So you wanna go fast. Build / buy the bike that fits you properly, matches your use case instead of trying to chase down if a wider tyre is faster or slower or more comfortable or not because the data we DO have says wider isn't faster or necessarily more comfortable. A bike that matches your use case and capability will be far faster than a bike that supposedly IS faster yet is somehow a mismatch for you in one or more areas.

That's all I gotta say. Mate talking to you is a waste of time. You should be grateful for all the free knowledge you can get here from people smarter then you, but you choose your own paths. Wish you all good kek

And there you go. You have absolutely no leg to stand on. And then try to discredit me by talking about "people smarter than me". So because you can't actually prove what you have to say with hard evidence means I'm clearly not the one smart enough. Typical internet troll tactic.

Where is the data. Where is the smoking gun. Where is the peer reviewed data that unequivocally states that X is faster / better than Y. Because IF there were such a study all the manufacturers that are trying to sell you on wider is better would be shouting it from the top of their lungs like all the manufacturers have been doing on the Aero side of things for years now. So thanks for proving that you aren't anything other than a salty internet troll.

[Alastair2308]

Because there isn't any obvious facts / data / proof outside of affiliated tests / data provided by cycling companies attempting to sell you something. The one test that isnt really affiliated with anyone is Brr and their testing shows that wider tyres aren't faster. So unless you have some actual data outside of the usual marketing claims and outside of yours or anyone else's #trustmebroguarantee it's faster my butt can totally feel it's smoother and faster and grips way better even though I'm not a pro and can't really push the bike to it's limits.

You clearly don't get one important thing. The longer the ride the faster the wider tire will be. You know why? Because of less vibration, which equals to less stress/fatigue on your body. You keep on talking about pros, so I will tell you one more thing. They are way more immune to fatigue then amateurs are. So that's another point why wider are faster also for amateurs. Bro if tadej uses wide you can be sure it's not slowing him down. Even for short tests like here from norcal cycling it's clear which tire is faster.

https://youtu.be/GTKjdTBCw58?si=ncGabxsOcAdzLFgd

And the fact that you "feel" narrow tire is faster has nothing to do with reality. It only shows you are looking at wrong things. You don't feel the speed, you only feel more vibrations, harder ride etc. Which in your head is received as being faster. It's similar to people who set their saddle to high and think they push harder from the top and generate more power, which again isn't tru. Only thing they feel is imbalance because of the Interia in the latter phase of the spin. Again feeling vs data

Your clearly don't get one important thing. Where. Is. Your. Data. Norcals
is great and I love their content but they are still not a lab controlled environment and there are just too many external factors at play to make any conclusions. Because I can also find a you tube video in 5 mins that contradicts Norcals points. SOOO. So we need actual scientific data to form an actual meaningful conclusion.

Where is your data from a reliable third party tester that is proving beyond a doubt that the wider tyre is going to be faster than the narrower one because of vibration. Where is the data? You don't have any.
Because I have contradicting ass data. My giant TCR advanced from 2012 rides on 25s (25WAM) and 17ID wheels rides better than my modern Felt AR on 28WAM and 23ID. But again. Ass data literally means nothing. So just because you are perceiving it doesn't actually there. So who's ass data is right?

Again. If you are going to go down this road of feeling And perception you are utterly wasting your time chasing tyre widths because the tyre width if going to have a negligible difference on perceived comfort. Things that will make a perceptible difference on comfort will be 1. Contact points. And 2. Your wheel build. 3.Frame.
Not all wheels are made equal and the majority of cyclists are riding around on wheels that are wholly inadequate for their use case. Super stiff carbon spoked wheels are going to be doing zero favors in the comfort department. And people are going to be chasing down wider tyres hoping to improve their comfort.

Want to improve comfort and get faster. Build / buy a wheel that is going to suit your use case. A 60kg high performance rider is going to have very different requirements to a 90kg Mamil but everyone buys wheels as though all riders are equal.

So you wanna go fast. Build / buy the bike that fits you properly, matches your use case instead of trying to chase down if a wider tyre is faster or slower or more comfortable or not because the data we DO have says wider isn't faster or necessarily more comfortable. A bike that matches your use case and capability will be far faster than a bike that supposedly IS faster yet is somehow a mismatch for you in one or more areas.

Do you have data from a controlled environment showing a narrower tire is faster?

I never said anywhere that a narrower tyre was faster. Nowhere was it stated. So the data doesn't exist and the claim was never made. However there are tons of claims as to wider is better / faster with nothing actually concrete to back it up. No peer reviewed study etc.

[Requiem84]

So your point is 'we don't know'.

If that's the case, then just ride what gives you most grip and most comfort, right?

[Alastair2308]

So your point is 'we don't know'.

If that's the case, then just ride what gives you most grip and most comfort, right?

Precisely. But everyone is trying to claim that they do know. But with no actual verifiable scientific data. All they have is Butt / Ass data. The data that their behind is giving them is unfortunately not a recognised quantifiable and measurable unit of measurement.

[Requiem84]

So your point is 'we don't know'.

If that's the case, then just ride what gives you most grip and most comfort, right?

Precisely. But everyone is trying to claim that they do know. But with no actual verifiable scientific data. All they have is Butt / Ass data. The data that their behind is giving them is unfortunately not a recognised quantifiable and measurable unit of measurement.

We do have some rolling resistance data. BRR compared 25-28-30-32 versions of Conti GP5K

https://www.bicyclerollingresistance.co ... parison#rr

We know that in the lab, a 30mm at 5.0 bar rolls faster than a 6.5 bar 25mm. But really, it's also just very close.

As long as there is no clear aero data from a wind tunnel, I just don't see a reason to go for a small tire. If there is no downside to use a wider tire, it makes more sense to use it.

(And I have yet to see a field test where the measured aero downside of smaller tires is more than 1 watt).

[Alastair2308]

So your point is 'we don't know'.

If that's the case, then just ride what gives you most grip and most comfort, right?

Precisely. But everyone is trying to claim that they do know. But with no actual verifiable scientific data. All they have is Butt / Ass data. The data that their behind is giving them is unfortunately not a recognised quantifiable and measurable unit of measurement.

We do have some rolling resistance data. BRR compared 25-28-30-32 versions of Conti GP5K

https://www.bicyclerollingresistance.co ... parison#rr

We know that in the lab, a 30mm at 5.0 bar rolls faster than a 6.5 bar 25mm. But really, it's also just very close.

As long as there is no clear aero data from a wind tunnel, I just don't see a reason to go for a small tire. If there is no downside to use a wider tire, it makes more sense to use it.

(And I have yet to see a field test where the measured aero downside of smaller tires is more than 1 watt).

Yup the one data point we do have shows that wider tyres are either faster the same or slower depending on how you set them up compared narrower tyres. And visa versa. Which causes me to lean the opposite to you. I see no real reason to sacrifice aero and weight when it seems the differences are so negligible. Provided I am not puncturing on every potential pothole I hit (I am not and I have hit some monsters here in S Africa) I see no reason to go wider than my 25 (advertised)
28 (wam) tyres.

[cajer]

You're the one claiming a wider tire is faster than the incumbent (narrow tire) so it's up to you to prove that. Also we know the narrower tire is more aero, sometime not by too much.

You haven't demonstrated wider is lower rolling resistance by more than the aero penalty in not terrible pavement

[Requiem84]

You're the one claiming a wider tire is faster than the incumbent (narrow tire) so it's up to you to prove that. Also we know the narrower tire is more aero, sometime not by too much.

You haven't demonstrated wider is lower rolling resistance by more than the aero penalty in not terrible pavement

Im still waiting for your responses to our earlier discussion

[Requiem84]

So your point is 'we don't know'.

If that's the case, then just ride what gives you most grip and most comfort, right?

Precisely. But everyone is trying to claim that they do know. But with no actual verifiable scientific data. All they have is Butt / Ass data. The data that their behind is giving them is unfortunately not a recognised quantifiable and measurable unit of measurement.

We do have some rolling resistance data. BRR compared 25-28-30-32 versions of Conti GP5K

https://www.bicyclerollingresistance.co ... parison#rr

We know that in the lab, a 30mm at 5.0 bar rolls faster than a 6.5 bar 25mm. But really, it's also just very close.

As long as there is no clear aero data from a wind tunnel, I just don't see a reason to go for a small tire. If there is no downside to use a wider tire, it makes more sense to use it.

(And I have yet to see a field test where the measured aero downside of smaller tires is more than 1 watt).

Yup the one data point we do have shows that wider tyres are either faster the same or slower depending on how you set them up compared narrower tyres. And visa versa. Which causes me to lean the opposite to you. I see no real reason to sacrifice aero and weight when it seems the differences are so negligible. Provided I am not puncturing on every potential pothole I hit (I am not and I have hit some monsters here in S Africa) I see no reason to go wider than my 25 (advertised)
28 (wam) tyres.

So what's the aero penalty then in watts?

[BenCousins]

As long as there is no clear aero data from a wind tunnel, I just don't see a reason to go for a small tire. If there is no downside to use a wider tire, it makes more sense to use it.

(And I have yet to see a field test where the measured aero downside of smaller tires is more than 1 watt).

On lack of wind tunnel data, couldn't we just look at what the pro teams run on TT bikes? Or what the widths are of TT specific tires? We assume those decisions are based on wind tunnel tests.

Regarding downsides to using a wider tire - this website is called weight weenies.

[Nereth]

Guys I've been super busy at work and haven't looked at this thread for more than 10 pages now but...

...didn't my original post provide a bunch of wind tunnel data, and also rolling resistance data, answering these questions? So why are the posts above talking about not having wind tunnel data? I also posted the rolling resistance data from BRR.

A few pages in most people were like "fair enough but I prefer the grip/flat protection/intangibles to half a watt" - did we advance much from there? Or is that still the consensus?

I think the biggest hole in my original posts, when I left off, was that all my rolling resistance data was from a single source. Did we find any alternate/more reliable source for vertical deflection normalised data? I realise a bunch of youtubers have done relatively uncontrolled outdoor tests at "recommended" pressure, but that's not really testing the hypothesis of this thread (which is about running narrower tyres at the stiffness levels of wider tyres so that you don't get that comfort/rider-hysteresis penalty - and has anyone attacked that assumption about equal vertical stiffness=equal comfort yet?).

[cajer]

Power meter inaccuary is not due to a offset issue, that is easily fixed with a torque calibration. Large sources of error are due to sampling frequency and rotation detection problem. It's is not at all consistant between efforts. So no he can't talk to any results +-2% of his power

You're saying that during one single ride, before which the zero offset has been used, the power output accuracy can vary 2%? In other words, effort one can be 400watts. Effort 2 - with objectively the samenoutput - could measure 408 watts (!). That is quite a claim. What is your source for this? Would make FTP testing quite useless tbh.

For the record, I think this guy is using Assioma's.

It's from first princpals as the polling rate of the strain gauges and how that syncs with data being reported out recording of rotational velocity. You can see someone explain part of that here: https://youtu.be/Tn382yODztw?si=qZGlrhs8yxwGD7PM&t=614

Why is this a big claim? It means there's an uncertainity to your measurements like the measurement of any other value in nature. It doesn't make ftp measurements useless. The accuracy isn't great, but you're likely to get a bigger difference in ftp testing results just from the condition of your body, mental state, and enviroment (cooling) between ftp tests spaced a few days apart.

Why do you think powermeter companies report an +-2% value. If they could be much more accurate with just an calibrated offset, they would report that number instead...

So how do you then explain the following:

PeakTorque did 5x10km runs with a poor tire/rim combo (32mm tire on a narrow rim) and 5x10 run on a 'good' combo (28mm tire on the same narrow rim). For all 5 runs the 'good' combo was substantially faster (about 6 watts I believe) and for all 5 runs the difference was really consistent. Not exactly 6 watts each run, but within a few watts of that 6 watts each run.

If you think about this logically, could it be that much coincidence that the power meter inaccuracy was so consistent to produce very similar results run after run? I think it's fair to say that we cannot objectively claim the difference between both test scenarios is exactly 6 watts. But what I do feel we can objectively say is that a 32mm tire on a narrow rim is aerodynamically slower than a 28mm on the same (narrow) rim in the test scenario PT applied (good quality road, straight, no altitude meters etc).

The runs vary quite a bit. In the Ican 28mm tire runs, cda varies by about 0.008. When we see that he's going ~36 kph, that gives a varience of 4.9W. He's doing about 280W, so that's an variance of 1.75%. Right at around the 2% error.

If we take the worst variance, p42 with 28mm tire runs. We see a 11W varience or 3.9% error....

So yea it's within the expected variance of the powermeter. There's so much noise and error in our door testing. I have no clue why you are looking at outdoor testing for this data, when wind tunnel data was presented in the first few posts.

[bobones]

My take from frequently riding both is that wide tyres and wide rims aren't really the game changers we're led to believe. When pressure is optimised for speed, the comfort difference is marginal, subtle and subjective. For me, quality 25 mm tyres on 26/19 e/irw rims at 70-80 psi (WAM 27) result in an all day comfortable, fast ride. I like my wide rims too, but they are not faster or noticeably more comfortable.

Far from being inadequate or obsolete, unless your roads are so bad you need big tyres to avoid pinch flats, there's no need to rush out and buy a new bike or wheel set just to get access to wide rims because you're really not missing out on much.

So much of the 'fact' here is really opinion based on marketing and fashion, which is further tainted by confirmation bias or emperor's new clothes syndrome. There's got to be some good reason for spending all that money on new kit, right?

[jlok]

My take from frequently riding both is that wide tyres and wide rims aren't really the game changers we're led to believe. When pressure is optimised for speed, the comfort difference is marginal, subtle and subjective. For me, quality 25 mm tyres on 26/19 e/irw rims at 70-80 psi (WAM 27) result in an all day comfortable, fast ride. I like my wide rims too, but they are not faster or noticeably more comfortable.

Far from being inadequate or obsolete, unless your roads are so bad you need big tyres to avoid pinch flats, there's no need to rush out and buy a new bike or wheel set just to get access to wide rims because you're really not missing out on much.

So much of the 'fact' here is really opinion based on marketing and fashion, which is further tainted by confirmation bias or emperor's new clothes syndrome. There's got to be some good reason for spending all that money on new kit, right?

[Mr.Gib]

It's always nice to know what is faster, but how many recreational cyclists benefit from a (hypothetical) watt or two? Even in race situations the difference will often be irrelevant to outcome. But for most recreational cyclist, having big tires and the ability to set pressures below the speed optimized pressure, removes road surface quality from the "where can I ride today" equation. As others above have pointed out, the real game changer is comfort (and safety), not speed. If you're not pinning on a number then I say f**k the pros/elite racers and what everybody thinks is best for them. Fat and soft rules. (For tires that is )