can heavier bike be faster,?
 

love my light stiff carbon bike with compact cranks however my ti bike with full sized old school 52 x 42 cranks just feels faster..i feel i even climb better

not sure if Real but feels true...

gearing will cause certain feels to be real.

Could be more aggressive riding position that makes you faster. Could just be the feel. I feel the same way about my old 1980-something steel bike. It's heavier, it's got the thin tubing, and I know it's not faster than my light carbon bikes, but it just feels faster to me. Might be that it reminds me of what I felt as a teenager when I rode that bike.

I'm no physicist, but I think heavier bikes are faster going downhill...

Faster on flats/downs is aero & rolling resistance. So, yeah. A heavier well designed bike could be faster than a poorly designed light bike.

It's like that urban legend experiment between warm water vs cold water. The claim is warm water freezes first. The caveat is one sample is doped with contaminants to stack the deck to obtain a desired result. The warm water freezes first because the other (with the antifreeze) has a lot further to go to reach it's new, much lower freezing point.

All things being equal, there are too many apples & oranges.

if peared in the like conditions, the cherry picking of results would be very difficult to achieve.

Heavier bikes are slower to accelerate and require more energy to climb. It's not much though, because bicycles are very efficient. The stuff we argue is really trivial until we define a goal or draw a finish line on the ground.

If we are only going downhill to the finish line, I might want the heavier bike, unless the distance is so short that someone might out accelerate me in a sprint.

Yes.

This here is faster but heavier
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...8994831e_k.jpg

than this........
https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/...70e0f562_z.jpg

I see what you did there.
;)

Heavier bikes are not only faster, but you get a better workout. :innocent:

Could be the tire pressure phenomenon- higher pressure feels faster because more vibration,

and we associate higher vibration with higher speed.

maybe not heavy bikes but heavy frames can be faster, just ask andy hampsten , eddy merckx had him on a bike that was 2 lbs heavier than the rest of the gang, for Alpe d'Huez.

[size=13px] Andy was like "wtf merckz" and eddy was like "trust me."[/size]

andy won the stage.

less energy going into flexing the frame. flexing the frame turns energy into heat, which is a loss.

If there was only a way to measure speed over distance between the 2 bikes.....:giver:

A heavier bike can be faster, and sometimes the design choices which make a bike fast can add weight.

There are very few situations in which a heavier bike will be tangibly faster because of the added weight, and there are many where it will be slower.

A 2lb difference in overall weight of a bike is of little importance.

I think it's well established that a rider can't determine minute speed differences. E.g. higher tire pressure feel faster but objectively they aren't.

"There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception." - Aldous Huxley

Maybe the old bike fits you better? But sometimes a heavier bike IMHO holds the road a little better in cross winds.

https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...8a055f525c.jpg
titanium 9 speed
https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...bb22be1bdf.jpg
full carbon 10 speed.

https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...8a055f525c.jpg
titanium 9 speed
https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...bb22be1bdf.jpg
full carbon 10 speed.

I'm seeing quite a difference in saddle to handlebar height between the two. I think it's the riding position.

Not true. 80 psi in my tires is definitely faster than 20psi.

You're correct about Hampsten being on a heaver bike, but wrong about the reason and the consequences. Merckx advocated slightly heavier frames because the greater stiffness helped riders to descend at higher speeds. And Hampsten chose to use an STI lever for his RD, which added some weight compared to a DT shifter.

If you think that a bike frame can flex enough to lose that much energy -- much less generate heat that could be measured outside of a million-dollar lab -- I think you need to take a physics course.

A few years ago, a European bike racing magazine lent 1980s-era steel racing bikes to three strong young racers and asked them to compare those bikes to their own high-end carbon bikes. The riders reported that they enjoyed the way the bikes rode except for descending the local passes, where they found the bikes to be too difficult to control at speed.

Is this (2021) the year Winter never ends here on teh Biek Forms?

Very few signs of Spring; hasn't even been a waving thread yet, far as I can tell, let alone an average-speed thread, or an 'I-passed-a-roadie' thread.