How to Adjust Cyclocross Bike Tubular Tire Pressure

Video Transcript

"MICKEY DENONCOURT: Cross bikes don't have suspension. The only form of really suspension that you have besides your legs and your arms is your tires. And a lot of people who are more serious cyclecross racers use what is called a tubular tire. This is a tire that's completely round, that has like a little cotton strip on the bottom that you glue onto your wheels. So those are called--often called a sew-up tire or something like that. This bike right now has tubulars on them, so you have a carbon rim here and this tubular tire is just glued right on. The biggest advantage of tubulars is you can run extremely low-tire pressure. You can see that, like, I can basically deform this tire as much as possible so it gets the best of amount of grip. It's not going to roll off. I'm not going to get a flat or anything like that. It's pretty awesome. These tubular tires allow you to run pressures as low as like 19 psi or 20 psi in really soft conditions. Ideally, you want to run your tires as soft as you can get them so that you're absorbing the most shock without them feeling like they're rolling through corners. A good starting point for a cross tubular is 30 psi and you can go up or down like 2 psi increments to make sure that you've got things where you want to be them--where you want them to be. It's great to have a good digital tire pressure gauge that you can use so that you can always find that baseline over again because you can--if you're a sensitive rider you can feel a 1 psi or 2 psi difference in tire pressure. So with your tubulars you can run them nice and low because they're designed to deform to get you your traction. So 30 psi up or down from there is going to be a good place to go."