I haven’t ever thought about how rim width might impact rolling resistance (RR), so definitely kudos to BRR for testing that. But I’m not sold on the decision to adjust air pressure for comfort, and then make the conclusions that the author made.
Just to be clear, the concern isn’t that the author decided to take comfort into account, but that they decided arbitrarily that it was a KEY metric, and that metric is completely subjective. Personally I try to strike a balance b/w RR (speed) and comfort, but when I just want to be fast comfort only gets a “is it tolerable” check. So I would expect the data to stand on its own, perhaps with a comment around comfort, but not quite the direction that the author decided to roll with.
For the next test, we’ve adjusted the air pressures to values that will result in roughly the same comfort level. We did that by calculating the expected rolling resistance from the previous tests. We kept the pressures the same for the 22C rim, +6% for the 18C rim, and -6% for the 26C rim. We got to a difference of 6% as that’s the change in the width of the tires.
