Hello and welcome to PowerDrift, this is Simplified where we take complicated ideas and we break
them down into easily digestible little bits.
Today we're talking about tyre pressures, it's a very common question and it's a very,
very important question as well.
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So tyre pressures, it's a very, very common question that we get, and it's a very, very
crucial part of your vehicle because tyres like I like to say, are your only contact
patch, it's the only way you're touching the ground, it's the only way you're transferring
your inputs, whether it's braking, acceleration or direction changes to the road, and then
get the vehicle to respond.
So, maintaining those tyres, and being able to enjoy that grip predictably and for a long
time requires you to do just one thing, which is to maintain your tyre pressures and the
process is actually quite simple, you need to establish a pattern where every two days,
if you're a very, very heavy user of your vehicle, or every seven days, if you're a
very light user, you need to go back to the petrol pump or puncture guy, whatever you
use and top-up your tyre pressures.
If you're going to take this seriously, I highly recommend you get yourself your own
tyre pressure gauge and I know, that when I heard this advice on the internet, I was like,
what is he talking about man, they've all got gauges, but you know that their gauges
don't work quite that well and I can also tell you that pressure gauges are no longer
either that expensive or they're hard to get.
The one I recommend is from Big Bad Bikes, it's made by a company called CruzTools, it's
a digital tyre pressure gauge, it's about that size and it's only about 1500 bucks and
I've had that for almost two years now and it's worked flawlessly, so there's honestly
no reason why you shouldn't get it if you're going to take your vehicle seriously.
Then comes the question of under what conditions should you be running lower tyre pressures
than what the manufacturer recommends and honestly, there's almost no situation where
lower tyre pressures help.
Okay, if you're riding in very loose surfaces like sand and the motorcycle's sinking into
the sand, lowering tyre pressures can help.
Trials riders who do essentially jumping over rocks and stuff, routinely run extremely low
tyre pressures because they want a lot of grip, but remember, their motorcycles are
on only for about 10-12 minutes at a time and after that there is an opportunity to
look at what damage there is and fix it.
That's not the case with your street motorcycle, so unless you are remarkably light, okay,
and I say that only because most manufacturers calibrate the weight of the average rider
to something like 65 to 75 kilos, if you're a lot, lot lighter, like a MotoGP rider, 45
kilos or something, there might be a small advantage to be gained by running a little
bit lower tyre pressure than usual.
On the flip side, if you're a much heavier rider, 110-120 kilos, you might be able to
gain a small advantage by running a slightly higher tyre pressure than stock as well, but
do you change your tyre pressures for the winter, for the summer, for the rain?
Absolutely not.
All of this is already calibrated by the manufacturer and that's why they have recommended tyre pressure.
On some of the bigger bikes, in fact, you might have two sets of tyre pressures, where
they tell you that you run this pressure on the front, this pressure on the rear when
you're alone, and a different set of pressures, higher pressures, when you're alone with a
pillion or you're riding with a lot of luggage, okay, those are the only conditions where
I would try to mess with the tyre pressure because there's honestly no other reason to do it.
Now, the thing about tyre pressures is that maintaining the right tyre pressure gives
you a lot of benefit, including grip that you can rely on, so if I were to give you
a tyre whose grip changes constantly from very good to even middling, that's not a bad tyre,
but the fact that you can't predict how much grip the tyre has will make your
life miserable, in the same way, the tyre pressure creates a reliable structure of the
tyre, which means, when I go into a corner and I change the loading on that tyre, how
it will squish and deform is something that is predictable.
If you take your tyre pressures too low, the deformation can become unpredictable, which
will feel like a nervous motorcycle and you won't have confidence to ride it.
On the other side, if I raise the tyre pressures too much, the tyre will not deform and it'll
feel like the grip is going away and yes, there are hypermiling websites that say if
you raise your tyre pressures quite a bit, you can get quite a lot of economy out of it,
what they don't tell you is that people who are riding highmiles like that don't really
enjoy a lot of grip round corners and they're actually quite happy to slow down four corners
when they do that and to me, that's okay perhaps in a car, if you're trying to get extraordinary
mileage out of it, but it is definitely definitely the wrong thing to do on a motorcycle.
So in sum, check your tyre pressures regularly, it's the most important thing you will do,
if you take it seriously, get your own tyre pressure gauge, run the stock tyre pressure
that the manufacturer recommends for most of what you do, you won't need to change it,
think of low tyre pressures only and only if you're riding a very loose surface, or
you have a much lighter weight and remember, if you lower tyre pressure on a loose surface,
when you get back on the road, you're going to have to raise tyre pressures again,
otherwise, you'll just get punctures.
Higher tyre pressures than stock are almost never a good idea, you can use them to get
some amount of mileage out, but the key thing, and this is the thing that is important,
is that when we say lower tyre pressure than stock or higher pressure than stock, we're
talking about 2PSI, 3PSI differences, it's not 10PSI or even 5PSI.
Even at the racetrack, where we know that the tyres are going to run at the high-end
of their performance envelope, the tyres are going to run hotter than normal, it's not
like we're reducing tyre pressures by 10-12PSI, that only happens to the absolute fastest racers.
Most of us who go little bit quick at the racetrack will only reduce tyre pressures
but 2 or 3PSI and that's only because the tyre will run hotter and hot air expands and
the tyre will come back to what is closer to the stock recommended pressure and that's
the only good reason to do it.
I hope this clarifies things for you, if you've still got more questions, all you have to
do is leave us a comment and if there are other topics you'd like to see discussed here
on Simplified, that's what the comment boxes are for.
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I know there's a lot of misinformation about tyre pressures,
and I hope that this will help clear it up.
Thank you so much for watching, this is Simplified.