Jan Heine on wide tires for the road

[R3awak3n]

Thread gets nasty with hating on his bikes and bike fit on the peg, its very typical 2022 paceline unfortunately. Not in my club mentality in did.

Like or hate the guy, he has a big helping hand, in bringing big tires to the market, all sorts of 650b sizes that people started to love to ride and now we are ridding all sorts of tires when before you had little choices on non knobbies. RH tires are great as well, I can only go by my experience and to me they make very good tires so when JH trying to sell em (and of course he does, its his business) I am ok with it because I do think they are some of the best tires put there.


What I also know is that 23s used to be the fast tires, I wonder how many conversations happened back then saying that whoever was an idiot for saying going up a tire size would make em faster, that person was probably kicked out of the club and here we are now

[wkeller79]

Originally Posted by spoonrobot

TBF this is way worse than the Pegoretti

I actually love this bike.

I have maybe seen one or two Pegoretti that looked ok. Never rode one, but I don't think they are a fabulously smooth looking steel bike.

I've also never ridden a RH tire. But I enjoy his articles.

[RobJ]

There is definitely a love/hate relationship with Jan and his articles etc. He does have a history with these products long before starting the company, so it isn't necessarily all fluff to push product. And there are plenty of other companies selling the same wide tires so he is just as easily pushing business to them for the rider who doesn't want to pay the RH tire premium. This particular article did have some comments that were anecdotal, but plenty of his others had real world tests, using the same equipment, test factors etc. I have never come away from his articles thinking that there is an absolute - wide tires are always faster than narrower tires. I'm sure on mostly road they are not, but the point is that they are not that much slower for those who choose to have comfort and cush versus a few minutes or two on a given route.

Look at the rhetoric cast towards bicyclerollingresistance.com who tries to test tires in a controlled lab environment. So they complain if it is real world and they complain if it is in a lab.

Some like Pepsi, some like Coke...

[benb]

He's using a super extreme tire here. Essentially MTB slicks. 26psi on a road bike!

Take that as it is. Most of us don't even own a drop bar bike that could mount tires that wide. He says he's not going to do it again, partly over brakes.

But if he's averaging 18mph+ for 150-200+ mile rides he is faster than almost everyone here, the tires cannot be as slow as we would naturally think. I would say this is an eye opener for me, I'd have assumed a tire that wide would be so slow that he would admit the experiment was a failure and it really really slowed him down.

What I take away from this is I should just run the biggest tires I can on my gravel bike and stop worrying about it. As soon as you get on dirt or really bad roads the huge tires are obviously awesome, and if you're slow on them you're just slow, it's not the tires.

Everything about a ride this long is anecdotal and ride specific. It's not a race where you're staying in a peloton. Your speed can be very largely determined by what plays out on the road and how much time you spend in the wind alone. He even mentions he screwed up his eating, which is a huge big deal on a ride that long.

You can't compare this to a 50 mile group ride at all where you stay in the group the whole ride.

There is no need for him to publish how to do these calculations because if you go to that RH pressure calculator and do "view source" all the math is right there to see. It's just a quick bit of Javascript, no mysteries.

[AngryScientist]

[prototoast]

I feel like articles like this are really just clickbait. He has a perfectly respectable ride report, that would probably attract a medium level of traffic. But if he reframes it as an unsubstantiated claim about tire width, all of a sudden it generates a lot more attention.

[spoonrobot]

Originally Posted by benb

There is no need for him to publish how to do these calculations because if you go to that RH pressure calculator and do "view source" all the math is right there to see. It's just a quick bit of Javascript, no mysteries.

Nobody cares about the tire pressure calculations. We want to see the data from his experiments with many trials, that were determined to be statistically significant with tests for regression to the mean.



When he posts this graph:


With this methodology:

We ran the bike with 44 mm-wide tires four times, then with 28 mm tires five times, then with 44s twice again. The averages are 15.47 seconds (44 mm) and 15.43 seconds (28 mm), and all test runs are within 0.51 seconds of each other.

The speed of the tests above is 27.6 km/h (17.1 mph).

And this claim:

we can say with confidence that at most speeds, 44 mm tires don’t roll slower than 28s.

The radar starts pinging.

11 trials, at one speed, to a broad and sweeping generalization? Pseudoscience, saying it politely.

Read enough of the BQ tests and the structure for their real world testing becomes clear:

+Keep the speed under 20mph, especially is the test involves pedaling
+Use pressures relatively high that most riders would not ride, 5-10% sag for demi- & balloon tires
+Phrasing designed to obscure - "roll" instead of a concrete descriptor

Which leads to the real world outcome: If your max speed is only ever 17.1mph, you don't ever pedal? Then sure, 44mm tires are as fast as 28mm tires.

[NHAero]

I took a look at RWGPS, at my fastest rides in the past 3 years. These are solo rides here on Martha's Vineyard, 56 in all that are at an average speed of 16 mph or more. Tire sizes range from 23/25 on the fixed Nagasawa; 25 on the Firefly; 28 on the Casati; 38 on the Strong; and 38/42 on the Bingham.

The Firefly is fastest, but in the nine rides over 17 mph there are two with 38 or 42mm tires. So for my old slow self, I have concluded that the chubbier tires (Gravelking 650B slicks) don't slow me down much, and there are many rides where I'm quite glad to be able to swing off on a dirt road even though the route is mostly paved. However, this hasn't detracted from the distinctly fun experience of riding on a high pressure skinny tire bike on good pavement, which is why the Firefly gets the miles it does. If I had the strength Jan has, and could ride a 400k brevet, I'd likely pick something in between, to get a bit more cush and stability when I'm tired or riding in low light conditions. Last October when I rode the 109 paved mile day in VT, I chose the Strong with 38s vs. the Firefly with 25s, and that felt like a good choice at the end of the day. When I head back up to VT to ride after D2R2, where I'll ride the 650bx42 GK tires on the Bingham, I may bring the 700C wheels for a paved road day, with 25s mounted.

I wasted a good hour last night reading through that whole VSalon thread on Jan's test of the Peg Love #3. That certainly was a questionable test, but holy cow, the vitriol! As Old Spud says, at the end of the day, they are just toys!

[RobJ]

Originally Posted by benb

He's using a super extreme tire here. Essentially MTB slicks. 26psi on a road bike!

Take that as it is. Most of us don't even own a drop bar bike that could mount tires that wide. He says he's not going to do it again, partly over brakes.

But if he's averaging 18mph+ for 150-200+ mile rides he is faster than almost everyone here, the tires cannot be as slow as we would naturally think. I would say this is an eye opener for me, I'd have assumed a tire that wide would be so slow that he would admit the experiment was a failure and it really really slowed him down.

What I take away from this is I should just run the biggest tires I can on my gravel bike and stop worrying about it. As soon as you get on dirt or really bad roads the huge tires are obviously awesome, and if you're slow on them you're just slow, it's not the tires.

Everything about a ride this long is anecdotal and ride specific. It's not a race where you're staying in a peloton. Your speed can be very largely determined by what plays out on the road and how much time you spend in the wind alone. He even mentions he screwed up his eating, which is a huge big deal on a ride that long.

You can't compare this to a 50 mile group ride at all where you stay in the group the whole ride.

There is no need for him to publish how to do these calculations because if you go to that RH pressure calculator and do "view source" all the math is right there to see. It's just a quick bit of Javascript, no mysteries.

^^ this too

[KonaSS]

I rode with my wife last night. We rode for 1 hour, doing 15 miles. She was on a 32 x 700 tubeless slick. I was on my mtb on 29 x 2.35 Specialized Fast Traks. I had no problem keeping up, therefore, I can confidently say that 2.35 treaded tires are as fast as 32 slicks.

[tomato coupe]

Originally Posted by KonaSS

I rode with my wife last night. We rode for 1 hour, doing 15 miles. She was on a 32 x 700 tubeless slick. I was on my mtb on 29 x 2.35 Specialized Fast Traks. I had no problem keeping up, therefore, I can confidently say that 2.35 treaded tires are as fast as 32 slicks.

Your wife told me she was doing a recovery ride, and was soft pedaling the entire ride.

[ktakashismith]

Originally Posted by spoonrobot

Which leads to the real world outcome: If your max speed is only ever 17.1mph, you don't ever pedal? Then sure, 44mm tires are as fast as 28mm tires.

This is a pretty important point. I was riding a bike with 2.4" slicks, and I thought it would be interesting to ride a pancake flat stretch of road by the river to see what an average cruising speed would be while maintaining a reasonable heart rate. Getting into as low and aero of a position as possible, I averaged 18mph, which surprised me for the fat-tire bike.

In completely anecdotal/trash science fashion, I went back out the same day (wind conditions seemed to be the same, although this is impossible to verify), and held the same HR target on the same stretch of road while wearing the same "kit", but this time on a bike with 28mm tires (so I'm not even going full aero-bro here). 24mph.

Cruising along at up to 30kph I'm sure tire width matters less than we think (aside from the possible weight penalty incurred in the difference between a 28mm tire and a 61mm tire). Aerodynamics seems to play a lot into this. I can never get my fat-tired bikes up much beyond 40mph down a hill, but my road bike will exceed 50mph on the same hills. Maybe I should collate all of my GPS data from the past two years of rides and give every data point a bar on a graph, call it science?

Now if the point being made is that over the course of a 250km mixed-surface brevet, wider tires are just as fast if not faster over the entirety of the course...then yes, I could see how that would be the case based on comfort alone. I don't think many people are doing Oregon Outback FKT attempts on 25c slicks.

[Gwerziou]

Originally Posted by callmeishmael

Assuming Jan genuinely believes what he says (principle of charity and all that), then his mind must be an interesting place. Who else does (even if unscientific) aero testing on fenders and handlebar bags, with the express intention of mounting them on a 50s style frame with a Nivex drivertrain? It's gloriously insane.

Agreed. I love him, Bicycle Quarterly, Rene Herse components... It's all wonderfully refreshing, weird, and unique and makes cycling fun again.

[Hilltopwalters]

Originally Posted by AngryScientist

Angry coming in hot with the goods. Nice looking bike, man.

[unterhausen]

I used to have a fairly negative view of Jan, but his company is the only source for a lot of good stuff, so I'm feeling better about him nowadays.

He is capable of changing his mind, which didn't seem to be the case 10 years ago. I would also say he has been very influential, even though people obviously don't want to admit it.

I thought the derailleur was a joke, tbh. Hirose influence, probably.