Originally Posted by
BarracksSi
Back on the road bike -- I think there's a balance between distruptively-bouncy-hard and energy-sapping-soft with tire pressures.
Agreed. What's surprising about Jan and Mark's results is that narrow tires don't win, despite the widespread belief that they are faster. I was out on Friday with a couple guys who are about my fitness level. They were on road bikes with narrow (23-25 mm) tires. I was riding my touring bike with 35 mm Panaracer Paselas, which did pretty well in the
Bicycle Quarterly test (though they tested a narrower version). All three of us kept up the same speed with about the same amount of effort. I run my front tire at 55 psi and my rear at 75 psi; I didn't ask but they must have been running theirs at around 120 psi. Of course we were on rural New England roads which are not really smooth even when they haven't been patched and repatched a dozen times!
Jan points out too that a lot of riders have been conditioned to think that hard tires
feel faster, even if objective measurements show that they are not.