Before Buying A Bike (vol 1…tires)
The cycling industry creates fads. It causes those pursuing the best bike they can afford to spend as much as possible, as often as possible. They do so even at the expense of performance, reliability and even safety!
Don’t buy in to fads. Even if they pan out, it takes decades to workout the bugs. Bikes have developed over more than a hundred years. There is very little new that has not been tried and failed over and over again (like eliptical chain rings). See four time Tour De France winner Chris Froome on disk brakes here (by the way, look for Chris to drop the elliptical chain ring fad due to knee issues this year).
Almost all the following was once considered common knowledge. You couldn’t pull the wool over the eyes of the consumer. Not so much any longer.
One professional road cycling team had reasonable success after going from 18c to 23c tires. Suddenly the industry has us riding mountain bikes with 3″ tires and roadies are looking more like hybrids! The truth is, wider tires, in longer races, are more comfortable. Enough energy is saved because of it to compensate for lost performance.
Fables of lower rolling resistance are just that. Tire compounds, tube and tubeless combinations do more on the road to improve performance (comfort, handling and in the case of e-bikes, range). The professionals’ shift to what consumers would still consider extremely thin tires (some now ride 28’s on long cobbled races), has nothing to do with your fifty mile or less rides on smooth ribbons of pavement or pea gravel. Certainly not giant, marshmallow tires.
Wide tires are not efficient. Your bike’s geometry, fit and frame material should make it comfy and stable, not huge tires. There are some, with certain physical issues, for whom actual fat tires can help. For the rest of us, I have a low end bike with 1 1/8th” 50# tires. It rides better than a fat bike, much less a simply wider tire.
Wider tires provide better grip on softer surfaces, at lower pressures. They are not for comfort or stability on the street. In fact, in the extreme, they hinder handling and extend braking distances dramatically.
Wide bicycle tires have taller, softer, sidewalls. This creates something called squirm. When you hit a hard pack or paved turn, this squirm reduces grip! This is why wide tires have low profiles and very stiff sidewalls on a car. Suspension magnifies this problem, but we’ll get in to that next week.