Clearance Sale

The Cycling Industrial Complex has a way of taking a good thing and making you resent it.

Take tire clearance, for example.

From about the 1990s to about the mid-2010s, cycling went though a period in which road bikes in particular offered minimal tire clearance:

If you were riding at the time this just seemed normal. But older road bikes could typically handle wider tires:

And obviously they can again now.

That’s not to say you couldn’t get lucky. For example, I was able to use 28mm Paselas (which admittedly don’t even count as wide anymore) with room to spare on my Ritte Rust Bucket:

But really, finding a road bike that could reliably accommodate a tire any wider than 25mm during this period was sometimes a matter of getting lucky. Like, those same 28mm Paselas also fit just fine on the plastic bike I used to ride in my racing days…

But I could not use them on this Litespeed, go figure:

But we’re past all that now. Road bikes have plenty of tire clearance, and even the professional roadies now default to 30mm. And this is a good thing, right?

Well, sort of. I mean yes, obviously it’s a good thing to be able to use tires wider than 25mm. But that doesn’t mean I have to like how it happened.

For one thing, the Tire Clearance Dark Ages weren’t as bad as some people make them out to be, because all you had to do if you wanted to go on what is now marketed as a “gravel’ ride in those days was ride your cyclocross bike:

Duh.

But more significantly, looking back now, it’s clear that the minimal clearance period was truly an aberration, and maybe even a conspiracy–because again, earlier road bikes had (comparatively) ample clearance:

So, for a period of about 20-25 years, the bike industry was basically throttling your Internet. It’s impossible to say for sure when they hit on this scheme, but the seeds were most likely sewn in the late 1980s, when they discovered the Power of Crabon:

Make the bike cool enough and nobody will question why they can barely get a tire into it:

But why would the bicycle industry eventually go so far out of its way to eliminate tire clearance that they started building suspension forks for road bikes that couldn’t accept tires wider than 25mm?

Well, the obvious answer is ignorance and a belief that skinny tires are always faster, but the cynical one is they wanted to drive customers in search of greater versatility to their practical and elegant mountain bike offerings:

Additionally, all of this was probably seasoned with a general feeling that if you’re afraid to ride a road bike with 25mm tires on a dirt road then you’re just being a “woosie.” (In retrospect, this was the one thing about which they were right.)

But eventually something happened to force the bike industry’s hand, and that something was Rapha:

As Rapha flooded the Internet with images of riders deep in the throes of psycho-sexual torment on steep unpaved climbs, consumers soon wanted more versatile bikes–never mind that the Continental riders were doing just fine on bikes with short reach brakes, 12-27 cassettes, and 25mm Gatorskins. So wider tires became acceptable again.

Of course, at the time, many of us would have told you to try a pair of 28mm Paselas on your road bike, and as long as they fit, to go crazy. This was the very definition of bang-for-your-buck–and you didn’t even need to buy new tubes! But with the bike industry being the bike industry, and the bike media being the bike media, it was clear that this would not fly, and instead they explained that you couldn’t just put a pair of wider tires on your existing wheels, because if you did you would die:

“Even though the norms might seem silly, they are real,” stressed Mavic global brand manager Chad Moore. “The safety concerns are real. The tests are real. The failures are real. It’s not bullshit. Being one of, if not the biggest wheel manufacturers in the world, we simply cannot take any chances. I can offer you a lot of math about percentages of failures per hundreds or thousands of wheels based on the ETRTO testing, but I don’t think I need to. With the amount of Ksyrium wheel-tire systems that we sell, you can imagine how even just 1-in-1000 failures could impact our customers. We just don’t want to take that chance.”

Yes, the same bike industry that said you needed an ever-so-slightly wider rim to use an ever-so-slightly wider tire is the same one that is now selling you hookless rims.

But of course the real coup was convincing people that the key to all of this was disc brakes:

How disc brakes are changing the game

The move toward wider road wheels, rims, and tires perhaps wouldn’t have come about with the speed and strength that it has were it not for two other trends: traditional roadies’ increasing desire to get off-pavement and away from motorized traffic; and the widespread popularity of disc brakes. While the former may be largely driving the trend, it’s the latter that is really allowing it to grow wings.

Oh, sure, they couldn’t sell us bikes with clearance then, but they can now, right? Never mind the fact that they could have been building bikes all this time with medium- or long-reach brakes, or with cantilevers, or with v-brakes… Never mind that you could even get away with wider tires on your short-reach brake bike, Mavic’s warnings of the fatal consequences of using a 28mm tire on a Ksyrium notwithstanding. No, in order to have access to the wide tires you already had access to in the days before the Tire Clearance Dark Ages, the bike industry would have to render not only your frame but pretty much all of your existing components obsolete.

And of course now that discs have taken over, too much clearance is the new too little clearance:

[It means your gravel bike frame is stupid.]

Which is fine, but at the very least could we stop measuring the tires in millimeters when they get this wide already???

It’s one thing when you’re talking about skinny tires, but who the hell even knows what a 57mm tire is? Just call it a 2.2 for chrissakes! This is like telling people your five year-old child is 60 months old.

But I guess it’s incredibly important for everyone to pretend they’re not riding mountain bikes:

See, if people figure this out then they won’t be able to sell you different tires for your mountain bike and for your gravel bike:

Validating sensations

Karrasch’s journey into tyre testing began with an observation many of us have likely had ourselves. While waiting for a replacement gravel bike, he spent time riding a hardtail mountain bike fitted with 2.4” Maxxis Aspen tyres. To his surprise, the speed reading on his head unit suggested he was riding faster than expected given the larger volume and knobby tread tyres fitted to the bike.

So wait a minute: he was waiting for a replacement gravel bike and he figured out his mountain bike was faster? Why not just keep riding the mountain bike? It seems to me gravel is quickly becoming the equivalent of asking your partner to wear one of these when maybe you should just try the real thing.

But yes, if only it were possible to design a road bike with rim brakes and ample tire clearance…