Cycling Tips: 23mm VS 25mm VS 28mm What is Best??

Cycling Tips: 23mm VS 25mm VS 28mm What is Best?? Here is the blog I was talking about in this video about bicycle tires and what width bicycle tire is best for YOU.

How wide a tire is too wide for optimum performance? Our research shows that wider tires don't give up anything on smooth roads, and gain a significant advantage on rough roads. This has been shown for tires up to 31 mm wide.

It's now a well-established fact that wider tires roll faster than narrow ones. Professional racers now use 25 mm tires, which are 20% wider than the tires that most racers used just 20 years ago. Will this trend continue? Can we expect racers to be on 30 mm tires in the future? No matter what the pros do -- they are influenced by many factors that have little to do with science -- the real question is: Up to what point are wider tires faster?

In our original tire tests (above), we tested the same tires in 21, 23 and 25 mm widths on a moderately rough "backroad" surface. The results were clear: The 21 mm tires were slowest, 23 mm was in the middle, and 25 mm tires were fastest. The speed difference between 21 and 25 mm tires amounted to about 2.5%. Over a typical 200 km brevet, I would gain about 11 minutes. It's not huge, but significant. These results appear to have prompted the current trend of racers using wider tires.

What about tires that are wider than 25 mm?