Coach’s Corner — Tire Types
The Secret to Choosing the Right Tire Size for Your Road Bike
Our Coach’s Corner series is your chance to have your biggest cycling questions answered — right from longtime cycling coach Darryl MacKenzie. In these short Q&As, Coach Darryl speaks from his 35+ years of cycling and coaching experience to help you become a stronger, smarter cyclist.
Motivated Cyclist:
Coach, there are so many tire options for road bikes these days — skinny tires, fat tires, tubes, tubeless. What do you use, and how did you determine which is best?
Coach Darryl:
The debate over the right type of tire has gotten quite heated — enough that it really piqued my curiosity in recent years. So, I decided to put the issue to the test. To do that, I focused primarily on which size of tire would give the best ride experience (but as you’ll see, I answered the question about tubes in the process).
To run my tire test, I put a different-sized tire on three bikes. Since each tire gets around 4,000 miles, and I pedal about 8,000 miles each year, this was a long-term examination. I pedaled 342 rides last year, so I was often pedaling a different-sized tire over three consecutive rides.
What I noticed:
I know the tests show that wider tires are faster on the flats. But, to be honest, I didn’t notice much of a difference. I’ll still take testers’ word for it that wider tires must be faster when your bike is up to speed.
What I really noticed was the following:
1. The wider the tire, the heavier it was. So that meant my bike was going slower climbing hills with bigger tires. While rotating, the extra weight is more noticeable than it is when stationary. Personally, I actually prefer going uphill faster to being a little faster on the flats or downhills.
2. The wider the tire, the more time it took to get up to speed from a stop. This was very noticeable. I counted the number of stops needed for traffic signals, stop signs and yield signs on my typical rides. On my three most popular 30–35-mile routes, there were about 2.1, 2.5 and 2.7 stops on average per mile — that translates to 60–80 times per ride. Having that many slow starts amounts to a big difference in ride time and energy expended.
That second point may account for why testers see better results for wide tires on flat routes: Their tests don’t include traffic signals and stop signs! Had they included stops, the results may not be so skewed toward wide tires. Perhaps if you are lucky enough to have flat, stop-free routes, you may benefit from using a wider heavier tire. However, if you typically encounter hills and stop regularly, a narrower tire is probably the way to go.
Note: I used 23-, 25- and 28-millimeter tires in my test and ultimately stuck with the 23-millimeter option. But the results would have been the same if the tires were 30, 32 and 35 millimeters. Narrower tires are just faster on hills and from stops.
This also answered my question about tube vs. tubeless tires in a roundabout way. Since tubeless tires can’t meet the pressure requirements of 23- and 25-millimeter tires, they aren’t even an option. If you choose 28-millimeter or wider tires, you can consider going tubeless, but I generally recommend traditional tubes for road riding.
