FROM THE TESTER

The background into our exhaustive tyre test…

We want to know how the tyres ride and how fast they are, but this requires two separate methods. The first is simple – we rode them hard for hundreds of miles in all weathers. But tyre speed is about rolling resistance and it isn’t possible to test this with sufficient accuracy on the road, even with a power meter. So, in partnership with Ben Delaney at Bikeradar.com, we sent the tyres to Wheel Energy in Finland, where each tyre was mounted to a wheel, inflated to 8bar (116psi) with an identical butyl tube, and run at 40km/h with a 50kg load on a drum that simulates a real road surface. The machine accurately measures the power required to keep the tyre spinning at a constant speed.