The Great Wheel Debate: 650b vs 700c Part 3: A Practical Field Test

Hello everyone and welcome back to part three of the great wheel debate. It’s been a while since we first looked at the differences between narrow and wide road tires.

In this video we are going to pick up where we left off with an experiment comparing 650bx48 with 700c x 25 mm tires by riding two 5 minute long timed sections of road. The purpose of this test is to determine if there is magnitude of difference in speed between these two wheel and tires sizes in a real world test. The math we performed in part one and two of this series suggests that the wider tires may actually roll faster, at least in the absence of wind resistance. I haven’t been able to test this theory until now. Over the past few years since first making this series I had a custom bike built that will accommodate wide 650b x 48mm tires.

There is a common perception that narrow 700c tires at higher air pressure will roll faster than a wider tire set at a lower air pressure, but is this true? Some folks such as myself have long wanted to know how close our perception is to reality. Jan Heine from Bicycle quarterly has been discussing this topic for many years. He has performed tests that have shown wider tires rolling faster than narrow tires. For anyone who has ridden on both sized tires will find it is easy to dismiss his results because riding on narrow tires very often feels faster. With that, today we are going to perform our own pseudo scientific test to see if we can make any meaningful conclusions.

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