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@Velocio
We did this last year: https://www.lfgss.com/thread80258.html as a group starting from Dorking, and I rode the whole thing again a little later in the summer.
The whole way is a very long day... and there are very few places in which you can get food and drink, so you will need to carry most of it with you.
Once you get to the South Downs Way it's a piece of piss... fairly smooth and flat, and even with Marathons at ~70 psi on a road bike you'd be fine.
The problem is that bit before Guildford. Parts of that were inaccessible when I did it, and little detours were necessary, and you'd find yourself doing this semi-technical sections down the sides of fields and across little brooks. Absolutely beautiful stuff, but really time consuming.
May well join you all, but if I do I'm just going to put Marathons on my super-light road bike. I've done the bulk of this a couple of times, and each time I did it was on a single-speed 29er with only 54 gear inches. I'm not making that mistake again... by the time you reach South Downs Way, you'll want to notch the speed up to at least 15km/h for the entire rest of the journey otherwise it takes way too long.
I heartily recommend the Fortune of War ( http://www.drinkinbrighton.co.uk/fortune-of-war ) on the beach at Brighton as the destination. It's impossible to get lost because you're following a train line, and the going along the coast with the sea on your right... so if you're above a few people you should just fragment a little on the South Downs Way and then meet at the pub on the beach for beer and chips.