Comment by sasawpg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sasawpg | Hacker News Reader

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Correct tread pattern and pressure for conditions will make a significant difference in rolling resistance, far more than just about every other tire property (weight, suppleness, etc). Different conditions require different tread patterns and different tire pressures. As for weight, you’ll save maybe 100g of weight per tire, which is admittedly amplified due to rolling. Drop a single water bottle and you’ll be back on top. You won’t of course find many “performance” bikes with wire beaded tires.

Most paved paths are best paired with slicks/semi-slicks, even when wet (snow/ice is a separate discussion). Yet many hybrid/city bikes are equipped with a bit of tread depth. The tradeoff is durability and puncture resistance - slicks/semi-slicks can’t compete. And for people buying these types bikes, it is far more important that they reliably get from point A to point B without any flats or maintenance costs than saving a minute off their daily commute, so it is a fair trade off.

As for tubeless setups, I would hesitate to recommend those to anyone that needs this site (not that you’re suggesting that). If you don’t know what tire you need I would be willing to bet you have no idea how to fix a tubeless puncture, top up sealant, or remove/reinstall the tire.

Re: the weight of a water bottle, rotating weight is very different than static weight.

My experience with 28-32mm sizes tires on pavement in an urban environment has been that tires with tread on them actually have much less overall grip and cornering ability. This seems to correlate with data I've seen from third parties measuring the actual square mm area of a typical "contact patch" between tire and pavement. It seems counter intuitive, because on a car you want and need tires that aren't bald. But on a city/road bike, the best possible performance on pavement in the size range of 23-32mm with seems to be gained by having a treadless tire with a grippy compound.

That’s exactly my point :) Puncture resistance may be improved with more aggressive tread but handling and rolling resistance will definitely suffer. It’s all about the amount of contact patch on the ground. Same reason why on ice you want to run very shallow tread while on snow or mud you want a very aggressive tire. You can correlate this with slick car race tire vs a rally tire. One is great on road while the other wouldn’t get you far.

For a fun experiment, head out on a wet day and try to corner on both 28mm slicks and 33mm+ tires with a decent amount of tread (bonus points if you use a mud CX tread). Personal experience dictates that aggressive tread will treat you to a good dose of road rash while slicks will continue to grip far longer. I’ve far more experience with this than I should (one should be plenty).

As for the water bottle vs. rotating weight, I noted that as well. Which is why I compared dropping 100-200g of rotating weight (tires) to dropping a 500-750mL water bottle. It is a very rough comparison, I haven’t ever done the math to figure out how close they are, but I suspect it is close enough. Even 200g of rotating weight isn’t THAT significant when you consider the likelihood your pair of wheels weigh 2500g+ (assuming low end box wheels since we are discussing wire beads).

As with some other highly technical disciplines I think what we're seeing is the possibility of going down a rabbit-hole of optimizing for 1-2% extra efficiency in various subsystems/components...

For people who road cycle very seriously this will lead towards things like bikes that have a $6000-8000 all up cost with deep aero section wheels, expensive tires, ultra lightweight components to put the whole thing near a UCI-illegal weight, and so on.

It's probably easy to spend $1500 on a road bike combined aero bar-stem package that comes out of a single piece CF mold and has very marginally better aerodynamic performance in wind at >35km/h, but the returns are minuscule.

There is definitely a phenomenon of diminishing returns with increasing money spent above a certain point, that would be difficult to subjectively notice unless tested by a person that rides a very large amount like >10,000 km/year.

Let's also not forget the impact of visiting or not visiting a toilet before riding. The weight change dwarfs most of the differences between single component choices, possibly all the way up to most of the components combined.

Not to mention risks and extra time added for mid-ride bathroom stop! If you don’t coffee and poop before a ride, are you even a real cyclist?

Don’t underestimate middle aged men in lycra with too much money to burn. They’ll spend hours obsessing about individual components and won’t bat an eye when it comes to spending $15k or more (Canadian, a bit closer to $10k USD/EUR) on a brand new bike every couple years, $3-5k on the newest dimpled wheels from the big Z manufacturer, tires, and so forth, all in the name of besting their mates in the Saturday morning world classic coffee ride.

While I don’t strictly identify as above (I’ve more sense than to spend $1000/watt, or so I like to claim anyway), I do my fair share of purchasing the extra few watts. I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time obsessing about what the optimal tire choice is for my next Cat 3 CX race. At least I’m realistic enough to know the hoards of 16-20 year olds with more handling skills and less fear will destroy my every day of the week. Joke is on them because they’ve real life coming to crush them :p

In all seriousness, I know fully well the 5-10W gain is marginal for me at best and will only get me so far. Genes, age and hours in saddle cannot be purchased. Being a late comer to the sport and not being blessed with the requisite body type, I can’t have any one of those three, but I can however throw more money at the hobby, unlike the younger ones can. And why not enjoy myself while doing so and ride around in style.

As for diminishing returns, don’t talk to bike enthusiasts about those. They’ll only be outdone by audiophiles

I'll just leave this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9epG_qaCimU.

> Don’t underestimate middle aged men in lycra with too much money to burn.

I think without middle aged men in lyrca spending $10k on bikes, most of the performance/road oriented bike shops in major metro areas would go bankrupt, because the profit margin on some of that stuff has to be insane. Particularly the accessories. Yes, I totally need a $95 carbon fiber bottle cage... Hook me up!

> I think without middle aged men in lyrca spending $10k on bikes, most of the performance/road oriented bike shops in major metro areas would go bankrupt, because the profit margin on some of that stuff has to be insane. Particularly the accessories. Yes, I totally need a $95 carbon fiber bottle cage... Hook me up!

The markup on higher-end parts and bikes is quite ridiculous. I've SRAM Red eTap on my road bike and cassette alone is over $500. Compare that to a Rival eTap cassette at $180 (two steps down) or Force eTap at $260 (one step down) and it is enough to make your head spin. Or if you want to stick to "old technology" and go with 11sp Force/Ultegra, you can get them for $130. I half-jokingly say that I'll sell the bike before any part wears out as it will be more cost effective to replace it.

My approach is to purchase lightly used high end bikes through private sales. Find a trusted source and let them take the initial hit. Covid put a bit of a dent in those plans due to lack of bikes everywhere, but at least there's still some deals to be had as you approach top range. You can forget any deals for bikes under $5000, you're likely to pay similar prices for used as for new.

Side note - loving the downvote! I can only guess a local Cat 5 legend got upset they didn't win their Tuesday night worlds even after spending $4k on Zipp 454s. That or didn't bother to read my whole post where I'm poking fun at myself for doing precisely this :p

As somebody that's now literally a middle aged man in lyrca sometimes - I find the whole phenomenon really amusing, but then again, I've also been riding since I was a lot younger, and poorer, and the best I could afford was an all-aluminum specialized allez with 9-speed 105 stuff on it.

Back in the day, I probably rode 4-5x more cumulative km per year than I do now. And at that time, I found middle aged men in lyrca with more money than common sense to be equally funny.

Have you taken a look at prices of a used Allez lately? Put a few IG/TikTok faces to it and it doubled the cost. Once upon a time it was a cost efficient way to race crits and not worry too much about cost of crashes. Now it is apparently a high end highly desired bike …

Edit: I’m also a ma… hang on, when does middle age start? I may still have a year to go technically! (But not in reality)

In 2005 I paid $1500 (USD) for an aluminum allez elite with the 9 speed 105 on it... Cheapest things on it were the FSA crankset and the fairly cheap 20 front/24 rear generic specialized house brand wheelset. Equivalent thing today would probably be a lot more. 10 speed tiagra is probably superior in every way to the groupset I had then, but a comparable bike now might be $2600? Or more.

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