Testin lopputulema ja yhteenveto
Takeaways- As always, its a balancing act

For gravel, tubeless tires are faster than tubed tires and tubulars of similar construction. Tread compound is important. Tires with the smoothest tread with sufficient traction for the course will be the fastest. Supple and delicate casings roll faster than thicker and tougher ones. Less puncture protection results in faster rolling speed. These last three items point to a tradeoff to make between reliability and speed. Super-fast tires are not fast when flat — or when you have skidded off the road due to lack of traction.
On this test, narrower tires rolled faster than similar tires in wider widths, and they would be lighter and accelerate faster as well. While the separate chunks of steel welded onto the surface of the test drum are rough and 30kph over it is fast, rougher surfaces demand bigger tires. There is also an energy-saving benefit to the rider to have more comfort and not be bounced around as much.
As for air pressure, testing by top teams with power meters on the roughest Paris-Roubaix sections found the fastest setup that also prevented rim damage and pinch flats was 0.5-1 bar lower than the pressure we found to roll fastest on this same lab test. This also applied to the winner, who won on the second-fastest tire in our test. The damping in Wheel Energy’s pull shock is probably less than the damping of the human body. It may make sense to use 0.5-1 bar (7-14 psi) lower pressure on rough dirt than this test predicts. On smoother dirt, using the same pressure for minimum rolling resistance in this test is likely the fastest.