Originally Posted by
koala logs
Before I had this truly crap cheap Wanda king tires. But the walls are so thin it actually had much lower rolling resistance than my current Gravelking plus tires!! I can cruise a couple mph faster on it but flats so frequently I had to let it go. The walls felt like paper, crazy thin, while the gravelking plus felt like thick leader hide.
If you actually are 2 mph faster on your old tires then your current ones are the very definition of a crap tire. Of course it is much more likely that there is no where near this kind of difference in tire performance. We get all kinds of "my tires feel faster" anecdotes but people somehow never manage to put a stopwatch on their rides and provide actual data.
The initial increase in CRR for new tires could well be that once the tire is out in the real world, there is additional stiffening of the tread rubber due to oxidation.