Originally Posted by
elcruxio
Do people not understand that there's quality tiers to tires? I can get a schwalbe marathon for 14 € per tire but conti GP5000 S TRs are 55€ a pop, minimum. One is a hard wearing allround tire that'll not win any races but might take you around the world safely. The other is a top end racing tire that's essentially built for pure speed.
If I were to put highest grade of professional racing track tires on our toyota I'd be paying out the nose and they wouldn't last very long.
If you want fast bicycle tires they're going to be expensive. You can buy slower tires for cheaper. But of course it's more satisfying to complain on the internet that the luxury product you want costs too much.
It also makes reasonable sense that a high performance racing tire is going to cost a lot more than a heavy duty one. Essentially, a racing tire is pushing the envelope of ratio of load to material--attempting to handle high stress use with the least amount of material possible. This requires much higher levels of quality control than the heavy duty tire because there really is no tolerance for defects with the racing tires. The smallest imperfection in construction or material is likely to lead to quick failure of the product. An "overbuilt" tire like the Marathon has enough structural redundancy built into it that a small imperfection will likely be compensated by some other aspect of the tire. Thus the marginal cost of producing one more Marathon is going to be lower than that of the racing tire at any level of production.