Tyre Tech

27/11/22 19:47 Filed in: Gear

Sometimes it seems as if there is only one school of thought in MTB tyre design...
While you might think I am going to talk about tread patterns, I'm not. Sure many tyres "look like a Minion", but that isn't what's on my mind today.

Maxxis is probably the tyre of choice in Australia (at least here on the East Coast - perhaps everywhere). They do produce a tyre for every purpose, which helps them to be popular. My main grumble about Maxxis tyres is that most (if not all) of the modern tyres (read that as anything that comes in a 29" size) have a dual compound knob on the tyre. To get chemical grip, they use a soft rubber that is capable of high grip on hard surfaces; but to get mechanical grip they form most of the knob out of a harder rubber that resists deformation under load. On day 1 this is great, but as soon as the soft rubber is worn away from the underlying support rubber, the tyre is done. Sure you can keep riding it, but it has poor chemical grip at this point (if it has any at all, that hard rubber can be pretty slick on some types of surfaces) and probably it didn't wear evenly, resulting in less than stellar mechanical grip too.
About three years ago, Pirelli entered the MTB tyre scene with a new range produced by a partner (Vittoria I believe - in Thailand) using Pirelli rubber compounds. One of the distinguishing traits of these new (XC only initially) tyres was the single compound through each knob. In a tyre like the XC-R (rear specific), the cornering knobs start out looking a bit worn, so they don't really change much through their lifespan. And they do provide very good chemical and mechanical grip.
Pirelli hired Fabian Barel, ex-World Champ at DH and renowned engineer for fast bikes on dirt, to help develop a DH tyre for Pirelli. After a couple of years of running prototypes under some fast racers, Pirelli has announced their new DH and second-generation Enduro tyres. And - queue unhappy noises from me - to get the characteristics the fast racers wanted they had to resort to dual compound knobs. Soft over hard, like Maxxis. The Enduro tyres on my Slash are single compound and have a tread pattern quite different to these new (now made in Italy by Pirelli too) MTB tyres.

I've run several sets of tyres on my Slash in the time I've had it. It came with Bontrager SE4s, front and back. At some point Trek added the SE5 to their lineup, and I've been running an SE5/SE4 combo for the last year or so. With little fanfare, Trek has introduced a revised SE tyre line, including the new SE6 (if an SE4 is like a Minion DHF, and an SE5 is like a Minion DHR2, then the SE6 is like an Assegai). One feature of the new line is soft over hard rubber to make the tyres more suited to race use in the EWS by their fastest Enduro team riders. This replaces single compound knobs (the SE tyres were softer on the outside and harder in the centre, but any individual knob was a single compound).

This probably cuts a tyres useable life in half.
If they were half the price then it would just be the inconvenience of purchasing them, mounting them and getting them sealed.
But dual compound knobs are harder, not easier, so if anything, the price of the tyres has gone up.

Now there is less incentive to reach for a Pirelli or Bontrager tyre next time I need new rubber on the rims.

Michael Hanslip Coaching

If you want to go faster, you have to pedal harder

Tyre Tech