Pun_Times wrote:
HTupolev wrote:
Paved performance is part of why I'm on 53s instead of something narrower.
If you believe that 53’s and going to outperform a 30-35 mm tire on pavement then show me the data
What particular tires? Obviously this is contextual; if your gravel is velodrome-smooth hardpack and you can smoothly and flat-free get away with 23mm Corsa Speeds, then going bigger won't buy you anything. I've seen people flat several times in ten miles on lightly-made 3Xmm-wide tires around here, though, so you tend to see toughened stuff like GKSKs in those sizes. One guy I ride with even uses Schwalbe HS404s on his gravel bike, and there's no question that those are far slower than my 53s (that guy is a cat3 racer who is normally stronger than I am, but he works hard just clinging to my draft when he's on
that rubber.)
I haven't done any structured testing, though. Just scattered observations from a few years of riding.
I built my gravel bike up 3 years ago on the cheap. 1984 Stumpjumper frameset! It's a very heavy build and will never climb impressively, but I fit it like a road bike (which required slamming the saddle forward on a zero-offset seatpost lol), and the flat-ground performance is what's interesting.
When I first put the bike together, I threw on some Continental Double Fighter IIs. They're about 45mm inflated, and have extremely thick and stiff sidewalls. For giggles I sometimes used the bike for pure paved riding, and when I went all-out on flat out-and-backs, my performances were averaging around 2mph slower than on my road bikes.
Summer that year I switched to a tire built more like a high-performance road tire (Rat Trap Pass EL), which measure 53mm and are what I'm mostly still using. Performance on those flat out-and-backs is close enough now to my road bikes that I can't really tell what the difference is from the Strava data; at any rate, a good day on the Stumpy is faster than a poor day on the Emonda.
So, 8mm more width but somewhere around 2mph faster, and much closer in performance to my road bikes than to where the gravel bike was with slow tires. This made clear to me that how the tire is built was having a
much bigger impact than how big it is.
The other thing is group riding. If I switch from a road bike to my gravel bike, I can mostly still road ride with the same people. My friends of similar ability largely can't do the same on their gravel bikes unless they swap tires first. Similarly, when we're on the paved portions of mixed-surface rides and we're all on gravel bikes, I move
way up in relative ability.
