On Jun 8, 9:13 am, Jim Thill - Hiawatha Cyclery <thill....@gmail.com> wrote: > > But cumulatively, over time, there are lots of little improvements that add > up to better products. The MTB arena seems to be more open to innovation and > experimentation. It's hard to imagine that 622 might someday be challenged as > the default size for road bikes...
Jim, you make an interesting point. From a purely technical perspective, 622 (700C) on road bikes is doomed. As people realize that wider tires can roll as fast as narrow ones - racing bikes are fast not because of their narrow tires, but because of their high- performance frames - it makes little sense to ride on narrow tires. (The pros are already going to 25 mm tires, as that is the largest they can fit inside their frames and underneath their brakes.) And as we found in our testing, if you want to preserve the nimble handling of a performance bike, but ride 42 mm tires, you need to decrease the wheel size to keep the rotational inertia the same. A 700C x 42 mm tire never will handle the same as a good racing bike, whereas a 650B x 42 mm has the same rotational inertia and can be made to feel very similar. It's nothing new: When motorcycle tires got fatter, motorcycle wheels became smaller. Then low-profile tires were introduced, and motorcycle wheels became larger again. Wouldn't it be funny if 15 years from now, 650B was the standard wheel size for both mountain bikes and road bikes? Jan Heine Editor Bicycle Quarterly http://www.bikequarterly.com Follow our blog at http://janheine.wordpress.com/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To post to this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch?hl=en.
