Road Tyre's

camber26

Hi,

I am a general newby to road cycling having just bought my first roadie on a classifieds page.

If anyone has some spare time, I would like a general run down on tyres as the 650 & 700 measurements are a little confusing.

I am hoping to do some competitive triathlons on the bike so any recommendations on tyres would be great. I have been looking at the Continental GP4000S which seem a fast and light tyre, does anyone have an opinion?

Thanks
Andy

danlikesbikes

For me they are a great tyre and have them on my summer/racing/tri bike done a few seasons on the same make/model of tyre and personally very happy to recommend them.

camber26

Great, thanks for the reply.

declan1

As said above they are awesome tyres. Highly recommended.

sungod

the gp4000s are light with nice sticky rubber, great in the wet, i use them on commute/trainer, but conti's rolling resistance usually isn't the best

the similar conti attack/force have very poor crr, i have some of those too, it's not that i'm slagging off conti out of hatred for them or anything :-)

if you're riding against the clock i'd go for, say, vittoria's open corsa cx and to save a few more watts use latex tubes

camber26

Great, thanks for your thoughts. I had a look into the attack/force ones and although they look good, the GP4000S is said to be a slightly better all round tyre.

I will check out the vittoria's open corsa cx. What are peoples thoughts on the SPECIALIZED SWORKS TURBO 23, i hear they are pretty fast and low rolling resistance, but a friend says they puncture easily but they may be trying to scare me away from the tire!!

sungod

those spesh tyres are listed as 185g for the 23mm, which is pretty light, typically a good 23mm road tyre is around 210g, maybe more

acording to this...

http://www.bikeradar.com/gear/category/ ... e-11-44783

...they were tested to have a "slight advantage" vs gp4000s and pro 3 race, which seems ambiguous as i think the p3r should test way better than a gp4000s, so what are they actually talking about?

however, they do say it's 25% better than their old tyre (mondo), the list i have says those were 0.0061, which'd make the new ones around 0.0045, that's certainly good, but not the best

the same tests that had the mondo figures gave the open corsa evo cx as 0.0039, comfortably better than the new spesh tyres, p2r was 0.0042, i haven't got numbers for the p3r, btw the attack/force are 0.0073/0.0057 respectively, which really isn't good

finding useful crr info is like getting blood out of a stone

although the spesh ones have good crr, the light weight is what'd concern me, there's not much rubber there, so it's likely to flat more easily and will wear out pretty quick

other things being equal, 25mm tyres have lower crr than 23mm, so i'd still go with evo cx, in 25mm or 23 front/25 rear if you prefer, they''ll roll better, and be less likely to flat

btw, to get an idea what difference 0.001 crr makes, with a total weight of 85kg, at 45kph every 0.001 increase in crr costs you over 10 watts, it's a linear relationship so you can extrapolate to other weights/speeds

for bunch racing it doesn't matter so much, but in a tt it adds up

camber26

Thats some top info pal, definitely food for thought. The Open Corsa tire's are definitely the ones that everyone is championing, I will take a walk down to the bike shop and check them out. Cheers!