Originally Posted by
meanwhile
If a crosser with 40mm Supremes will run as fast as your road bike with 23s at the wattage you use for commuting, brake and turn faster, handle pot holes better and puncture less (and all of these things are true) then, for that purpose, the 40 is a better tyre. You might not like it as much, but these are different things. Lesson in basic logic and English: Don't confuse "Best" with "What I like most." Objectively, a 23mm tyre is inferior to a 40mm tyre made of race grade rubber like the Supreme.
You're leaving out the weights though. There are a lot of things which could be made better on a bike if you're willing to deal with a substantial increase in weight...but the end result would be a bike that weighs 40 pounds.
So you have to cut corners somewhere: spoked wheels instead of solid wheels, skinny tires instead of wide ones, a frame that can only hold 300 pounds instead of 600 pounds, nonenclosed drivetrains, etc, etc. Given all the stop and go accelerations encountered by a commuter, I'm of the opinion that commuting bikes benefit from lightness more than any other; So if there is a place where the skinny tire compromise would be worthwhile I think it would be in the context of commuting.
BTW, extra weight results in lost energy for the same reason that hard tires bouncing/vibrating results in lost energy. While in theory the energy is returned after a little round trip, in reality it encounters inefficiencies along that path which result in net losses. It's the "bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" principle.
An unfortunate fact of science is that often the things which are objectively measured are merely the things which are
easy to measure as opposed to the things which
should be measured.
Actually, Specialized is a client of
Wheel Energy Laboratories, so they
do have qualitative data, although perhaps none that they're willing to share, or for that particular variant of Armadillo.
Or maybe they don't think the experiments are very informative? This particular technique for measuring rolling resistance has been harshly criticized:
