The article mentions this, and concludes that the weight doesn't matter as much as people seem to believe: > Wider tires are a little heavier than narrow ones.

The article mentions this, and concludes that the weight doesn't matter as much as people seem to believe: > Wider tires are a little heavier than narrow ones. The difference is smaller than many cyclists imagine – the air inside a wide tire doesn’t add weight – but a wide tire has a little more rubber and casing. Won’t this make the wider tires harder to accelerate? The answer is “No.” > The reason is simple: Bicycles don’t accelerate very quickly. Even a professional bike racer’s power-to-weight ratio is far less than that of the slowest economy cars, and those don’t exactly push you back in the seat when you floor the throttle. Bikes don’t accelerate fast enough for small changes in wheel weight to make a difference. > That is why professional sprinters can use relatively large wheels (which inherently are heavier) and still win races. The UCI requires a minimum wheel size of 55 cm, yet racers use 700C wheels that are 10 cm larger than required. If wheel weight mattered as much as most cyclists imagine, then pros using the smallest wheels would win every race. And yet, even though many have tried smaller wheels, all have returned to 700C wheels – probably because the larger wheels handle better due to their optimized rotational inertia. (But that is a topic for another post.)