Great opportunity to ask what is more appealing about thicker tape to you? When we started this, the conventional wisdom was that we had to do 3.2mm tape because of the 'comfort' and subsequent testing showed that it really wasn't more comfortable during riding as most tapes squish down under the weight of your hand and then don't rebound sufficiently to provide much of any cushioning.. so to the test machine the dynamic behavior of 2mm and 3.2mm are roughly the same even though the 3.2 gives you that super cush feeling when you first grab it.
Nobody in our testing pointed to girth of the bars as a desired outcome of thicker tapes, though I would imagine that if you had big hands this would be a point of preference..
We did have athletes and testers who wouldn't wrap the wings of their bars with tape for aero reasons, so seems like thinner tape is preferred for aero..
Honestly, I've been riding with the 1.85 on one side and the 2.5 on the other for 4 months and can't really tell a difference. My hypothesis is that with the high rebound foams the dynamic differences relative to thickness are much harder to discern as the rebound rate is relative to frequency more than tape thickness.
Either way, would be interested to hear and understand preferences here. We approached this category completely from the outside and as usually happens when you do that we sort of blew a lot of the conventional wisdom out of the water.. of course we also then did add a thicker version of the tape as having just one thin model was probably too much for the market to bear at one time!!
Josh
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