Quote:
Originally Posted by munky000527
I'm much more interested in LRR and treadwear than I am in traction.
And I was actually thinking about decreasing the width, not increasing it. The article in that link says the opposite, but I thought that the least amount of tire surface touching the road would produce the least amount of friction. Tires with a smaller width also seem to be less expensive from what I've seen so far.
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Friction with the road surface is not rolling resistance. Rolling resistance is mostly about internal friction - within the tire. This is controlled by the amount of deflection, the amount of material being deflected and the properties of the material. That's why tires of the same size have such different RR - the materials are different.
But lower mass also produces lower RR. So all season tires will be better than all terrain tires.
And as counter-intuitive as it may seem, a larger tire is better - it has more load carrying capacity so it deflects less under load and that is more than the affect the increased mass has.
But there is a safety aspect to this. Going smaller reduces the load carrying capacity of a tires, so under the same conditions it will run hotter and have more stress. That makes smaller tires more likely to fail - definitely not the wau to go!