Functional bikes. Not Porn not Anti

Thanks ed. I'm not sure I agree with lots of that, but I appreciate your ongoing commitment to educating people about tyre width. If only British cyclists were as enlightened as their American cousins!

I've been reading 'Bicycling Science 3rd Ed.' from the MIT Press, and they still seem to conclude that thin, high-pressure tyres are better. That said they mainly focus on pure rolling resistance as their measure of performance. This is measured using rollers with smooth surfaces. On most roads in real-world conditions, they acknowledge that harder, smaller tyres force the rider to expend more energy in vertical motion over obstacles, as well as causing more abrupt velocity changes, so I think that this area of performance merits more investigation. Perhaps the rollers could be 'surfaced' with varying degrees of roughness?

I got the book because I thought it would inform my framebuilding, but so far it seems to indicate that HPVs are the way to go...