veganbikes

[QUOTE=Sy Reene;22851293]Having ridden the old Corsa G+ tires through some nasty rain downhill I can say they are really really good tires with loads of grip. I was scared for my life going down basically a 1 lane highway but my tires felt solid and planted and like they didn't want to leave the road.

Wildwood 

Braking is over-rated. Anticipation and situational awareness are not.

Anyone considering a tire based on braking differences should take up hair splitting as a hobby, a better use of one's time, imho.


edit: there are a fair number of exceptions. Stopping on: Ice, snow, mud, soft sand, wet wooden mossy bridges/structures, trials bikes, predominantly off pavement downhill-going bicycles. The science of specialty tires for specialty situations has been regularly tested and updated by those in each performance driven specialty category. (example: the well established benefit of low pressure tubeless tires for mountain biking (and other) uses)

track riders are very picky about tire surfaces, but not for anything to do with braking.

blacknbluebikes 

Makes me think of Harvey Penick's Little Red Book. Something about "how do I put backspin on my golf shots?" ; "How often do you overshoot the cup?"; "Never" ; "Then why do you want backspin?"
Meaning: during normal road conditions, I can't think of any situation in the last, oh, ten years where the rubber compound would have made one iota of difference. Given good tires & good brakes, not cheap stuff, I don't think there's ever been a situation where my skills outperformed the equipment. Any time I experience a slide or a skid, it was definitely my personal failure to anticipate and/or react. Non-normal road conditions? I don't play that.

79pmooney

I just remembered an amusing conversation I had with Portland's fix gear guru a few years back. I'd recently bought from him some grippy all weather tires for my winter commuter. (Fix gear with excellent brakes.) I was reporting to him I liked the grip though they were pretty heavy. He said he'd stopped carrying them and had in fact sent his stock back. What?! Answer - the fix gear crowd. They were getting injured try to stop The problem was that the tires were too grippy. They could not start a skip to do a proper brake-less skip stop and were instead pulling muscles and the like trying to initiate those skips.

So - if you really want to stop, take it from the folk who need traction more than anybody else, those who use only their rear tires to stop. Get the slipperiest tires you can find. So obvious I don't know why it took me this long to figure it out.

(I was a favorite customer of that guru despite having a the dirtiest, least upscale fix gear in part because I really rode my fix gear. In all weather. He sold some really nice ones. (3Renshaws and the like.) But he cringed when the brakeless crowd lusted over them because he knew them buying those bikes was a near certain death sentence for the bike.