Originally Posted by
vespasianus
Not sure when Jan started this thinking but larger and substantially heavier tires were shown to be faster and more comfortable in the MTB world many, many years ago (10+).
In my mind, the innovations in the bike industry are still coming from the MTB side of things.
Things are substantially more complicated when you start talking about MTBs. The typical engineering simplification/assumption of a basically smooth surface to ride on goes away completely and so the lab rolling resistance tests also become meaningless. I was never into mountain biking, but I vividly remember when I did my first cyclocross race with my tires pumped up to the max psi they would take. That sucked. Afterwards some kind soul suggested that I try closer to the minimum psi they would take, and holy cow that makes a difference. But you can't just put MTB tires on a road bike and make it faster, so there was a lot of work to be done to translate the benefits.
Speaking of MTB driving innovation, did you see this year's Milan San Remo result? The winner attributed his victory to using a dropper seat post.