Quote:
Originally Posted by bicycletricycle
Your attempts to muddy the issue do not make the situation any less silly. We aren't talking about trains or chip seal.
I repeat, the radical changes in "facts" about what the most efficient tire width / pressure, even in a limited variable environment like the track, is shocking.
They didn't even make high end tires in sizes above 25mm for years, now that is the smallest "experts" recommend.
this is a huge change that is way outside of your "well different variables call for different solutions excuse making" 
The whole world of cycling was just way wrong about tire widths and pressures, or maybe was right and now we are wrong, I don't know but it is crazy. |
This isn't correct. There was vocal opposition to narrow/hp as the best. For example, Jobst Brandt was besieged often for his views that max pressure narrow tires were fastest even on the rough unpaved tracks he rode between pavement sections. Bicycle magazines sometimes printed letters arguing against the experts from users arguing that they had better road results on 28/29/30mm tubulars than expected.
I don't disagree with your broad point, but glossing everything from the post together as a monolith isn't an accurate representation. We can look back at the past as settled science based on the idea that what we know now had to be the most common and accepted because, we know about it now, but that isn't correct. So much information from the past never made it into the computer age, and so much of that information was from the outskirts, the opposition, the smaller groups of minority thought.
You can find all sorts of scans from old bicycle magazines and catalogs of marketing materials or reviews or technical details but it's very hard to find scans of letters and op-eds from the public which were also published in every issue.
I'm reminded of a short anecdote I experienced last year. I was loaned a big batch of
Bicycle Guide issues from the early-mid-1990s.
Bicycle Guide covered road and mountain and eventually spun off the road stuff into
Bicyclist. The first issue of
Bicyclist the editor Garrett Lai wrote an introduction to the new magazine and how the Road-Only direction was going to go. He mentioned that the magazine was successful covering both MTB and Road back when it was
Bicycle Guide, that nobody complained and the spin-off was to better serve each group of cyclists.
Well, as I worked through the magazines I found that wasn't true. Almost every issue from the early 1990s had letters to the editor complaining about MTB coverage and how the subscriber wanted less or no MTB and more Road. Dozens and dozens of letters.
My point is that it's easy to view the past from a forward looking perspective. It's easy to get caught up in the current messaging and marketing. It's easy to forget that people in the past may have been just as curious and disagreeable as they are today and done the best with the information and iteration they were able to generate. We will never know every opinion or idea from the past but we can be sure that our view of what it was like will most likely get worse as it recedes into the distance.