1. First off, I’m running Bontrager tires on Bontrager rims and the dude at the bike shop insisted that the logos line up. Sounded fine to me.
2. Also running tubless with Stans so to hell with the lining up the tubes.
3. Totally an Image thing, get out and ride.
4. The only people that wear Lycra and spandex are people that do timetrials and races or people that want to “look” like Mountainbikers.
5. I’m with ya ghost rider, On my hardtail I put my computer sensor on the worng side of the wheel and said “to hell with it” I’m out of zip ties and this should be good enough. The tires actually performed a lot better. Now I put them on backwards purposely on that bike.
6. Sorry Quin, to say that someone who doesn’t waste the time to line up their valve stems doesn’t care about their bike is crap. I paid almost as much for my bike as I did for my last car and care about it equally as much. I wash it after every ride, strip down the chain and lube it after every ride. I clean and inspect my shock and fork, polish my rotors and check the tightness on all of the bolts on my bike after every ride. But!…..When I’m slamming through a rock garden at top speed, jumping a log-pile or hucking a six foot drop I couldn’t care less whether my “hot patch” is aligned with my valve stem! All I care about is whether my equipment is going to hold up.

and if the tire does have a Hot Patch on both sidewalls, the whole “flipping the rear tire” argument doesn’t work.

I am one to line up the hot patch and valve, and I get annoyed at people that don’t because it is such an easy thing to do, and it very well care make things easier, it is a sign to me that the rider honestly doesn’t care about their bike.

GT - Thank You for witing this basic level information.

Amen! That’s really the only reason to mount the hot-patch side the way described above.

Some tires work better “backwards”…I remember when Farmer Johns came out (the ones with the chevron-shaped center “paddles”), if you ran them so the back (scoop) side of the chevron bit into the ground first, they got WAY more traction in really loose conditions…soft sand and loose clayey muck along coastal Alabama, in particular. We looked askance at folks running them the “right” way!

Here’s a “He looks like a Fred” story…

I bought a new wheelset for a bike after tacoing the factory wheels, and the shop transferred the tires onto my new wheels, Rhyno Lites on XT Disc hubs. I didn’t have disc brakes at the time, but I got the better hubs because I planned to eventually upgrade.

The shop mounted the front tire backwards on the wheel. I decided, since I am lazy, that my easiest option was to just mount the front wheel backward. A few people who looked closely at my bike noticed I had a disc hub with no rotor with the mount facing the right, so I got to tell them the story.

They though I was dumb.

This was backed up by my riding skills.

Also: The reason the “hot patch” is designed to go on the right is because most photos of bikes are taken from the drive side and tire makers want to show off their logos in magazines.

But I do think about these things too. I mount my tires 90 degrees to your recommendation because the graphics on the wheels (Mavic) compete with the tire graphics.

But I do like your point of knowing where the holes line up. But I also used to rotate my tires 10 or 20 degrees when I fixed a flat (particularly on the rear) because the brakes tend to grab more in one or two spots and concentrate the tire wear. So rotating the tire a bit moved the wear spot. This has become a moot point with tubeless plus Stans. May not be as important with disk brakes either.

But to show how much I care about cool, I wear Lycra.