Don't forget your tires
- Sans Chaine
- Sep 30
- 2 min read
Tire rolling resistance is emerging as an important consideration in helping us ride faster. Think of this as part of your toolbox, ways to ride faster without gaining fitness.
It used to be that we thought a hard tire was a fast tire. Now, with better testing, we have come to realise that a hard tire isn't fast. A hard tire bounces over the imperfections in the road surface we are riding on. The fast tire is the one that deforms and stays in contact with the road surface. Very counter intuitive.
This ability of a tire to stay in contact with the road surface comes about in two ways.
ROLLING RESISTANCE
When considering tires to buy one thing to think about is the tire's rolling resistance. This is determined by casing, tire design (width) and tire pressure. To look at the first two you can check how tires perform on the bicyclerollingresistance.com website. Here you can look up different brands, models and a variety of widths. All of which you can compare. There can be some serious differences.
You may also consider other aspects of performance like puncture resistance etc. They score the tires across a range of characteristics.



TIRE PRESSURE
Now that you have some fast tires you need to figure out how hard to pump them up. We now know that lower pressure is typically faster. What blew my mind and had me start riding lower pressure was the observation made by a team testing tire pressure at Paris Roubaix, a race notorious for rough cobbled sections. In the testing the team found that the tires got faster and faster at lower pressures...until they broke the rim. You might think that this doesn't apply to you if you are a road rider, but it does.
This isn't to say that the lowest pressure is the best, as we still have to consider other aspects like sidewall integrity and cornering for instance. So where to start?
A good place is the Silca tire pressure calculator. Here you can input the type of road you will be riding on, tire width and quality, and get a pressure range to test out. You want to see how your tire feels and performs.
You might not think that this is a big deal, but on a recent podcast Silca helped look at different tires and which of three pressures would be the fastest. They ended up finding that the lowest pressure, admittedly on gravel, was the fastest. The big take away though was that there was a 12% difference between the watts needed to push the tire at the highest pressure and the second highest. That is with a tire pressure change of only 2%. And while it might not be so dramatic on the road bike too high will still be slower.
The final piece of the puzzle then is getting an accurate tire gauge and to start working towards some lower pressure in those tires. Then when it is time to put some new ones on do a bit of research to find the right fast tire to meet your needs.
Comments