Originally Posted by
vespasianus
Not sure when Jan started this thinking but larger and substantially heavier tires were shown to be faster and more comfortable in the MTB world many, many years ago (10+).
In my mind, the innovations in the bike industry are still coming from the MTB side of things.
The first 'Bicycle Quarterly' article that I recall addressed tire width and pressure was from the August 2009 'Minimizing Suspension Losses'. "
Wider tires run at lower pressures are very effective in reducing suspension losses .... Further testing is required to determine whether the added width or the reduced pressure are more important". pp9 I remember this article being a kind of epiphany for me and replaced my tires with 25mm ones with lower pressure that season. Within my own cycling group I think I was in a small minority running wider on the road at that point. So Jan's been thinking about this for at least 13 years.
But if you want to trace this back even further you can go back to Archibald Sharp's "Bicycles and Tricycles" 1896, which has comparisons of rolling resistance of various tire widths (although no pressures are given) and a discussion of suspension losses from tires where Sharp though up to 12% of energy was lost due to suspension loss on bikes with solid rubber tires. So the bicycle tire issue as been around for 125 years or more. Nothing new under the sun.