What makes cycling less effort, dropping a few pounds of the bike or using less grabby tyres?
I've just stuck some verticals on my bike and last nights ride was hard work, seemed a lots less effort on the old MK's. However the verticals are a lot heavier too.
Just thinking out loud like.
I did a bit of a test: 21 lb scott scale and a 28lb commencal meta 55. Normally have 2.1 crossmarks on the scott and 2.35 highrollers on the commencal. swapping them over made the weight difference 5 lbs instead of 7 lbs, but the commencal was much faster (in a scientific and quantitative test of course*) than the scott with the tires swapped.
couldnt categorically say that rolling resistance is more important than 5 lbs in weight, but it was interesting.
*Felt faster to me anyway!
Rolling resistance will be proportional to all up weight of rider and bike. So you wouldn't need much change in rolling resistance coefficient to counteract the small change in tyre mass.
e.g. You save 2lbs on the tyres, bike + rider = 200lbs. Therefore 2/200 =1% change in total mass. But rolling coefficient of 1 tyre could be +/- 25% of the other easily.
I've had a situation before where I've used low rolling resistance, but medium weight tyres on one bike, some Hutchinson Python tubless light with tubes and xc717 on hopes(slightly different from total weight of bike type) and stupid lightweight wheels and light tyres with more rolling resistance (Conti Mountain king supersonics on american classic, DT rev and stans olympics).
Odd thing was, the lighter wheels felt slower. It would seem the lack of momentum was more of an issue.
or maybe I imagined it all...
What makes cycling less effort, dropping a few pounds of the bike or using less grabby tyres
TBH, dropping a few pounds off the rider seems to make the biggest difference for me 😉