Bridgestone Battlax T31
Bridgestone has come up with a new sports touring tyre that should have oodles of grip and decent wear-rates. To see if this is the case we headed to the Morocco-roads launch of the black hoops to see how they handle for ourselves.
Who says that when your saddlebags are stacked to the brim and you’re travelling across continents on a sporty bike you have to ease up on the pace just to make your tyres last? Not us. And not Bridgestone either. The Japanese factory has just launched its new Battlax Sport Touring T31 tyre and chose the rough-tread Tarmac of Morocco to show us what the latest addition to the rubber stable was up to.
The T31 (T for touring) replaces the T30evo and, according to the boffins at Bridgestone, gives the rider more feel and more grip without affecting wear rate.
I know what you’re thinking and you’re right – that’s a pretty standard claim for a manufacturer launching a new tyre. Specifically, though, Bridgestone says that it’s worked hard to improve wet grip, particularly in low temperatures, with a tread pattern that disperses water more efficiently by increasing the ‘sea:land’ ratio on the shoulder of the tyre. (Un)fortunately, during the launch event in Morocco the conditions were neither wet nor cold so I’m far from qualified to tell you how they’d cope through the thick of a British winter but if Bridgestone is to be believed, the T31s have a 3% higher coefficient of friction on a wet surface compared their predecessors. Great if you live in Scotland. We weren’t in Scotland though, we were in North Africa, and Bridgestone had lined up a bunch of bikes so we could get to grips with the new T31s. And it was a varied bunch: nakeds, sports tourers and some big adventure bikes, most likely in an attempt to showcase the fact that Bridgestone offers a full lineup of sizes to cater for everything from your CB500 to your 1200GS. My first outing was on a Kawasaki Z650, not the fastest thing on the planet but a great bike to test the tyres’ sporty flickability. The Z650 was fitted with the standard, rather than GT spec tyres, which is a reinforced version of the same tyre designed to cope with bigger, heavier models such as big touring or Adventure bikes.
Some of the roads in Morocco are great, but some of them aren’t. During the first portion of the ride we were subjected to some of the lumpiest, patchiest, nastiest roads this side of the Sahara, but that didn’t ruin the fun that the Z650, the T31s and I were having. While the 650’s suspension did a more than acceptable job of keeping the bike pointing in something like the right direction the tyres had their work well and truly cut out to keep hold of the road surface which was undulating ferociously beneath them. And they were doing a very fine job indeed.
This was likely to be, at least partly, to do with the 3LC with cap and base construction that Bridgestone has adopted on the rear tyre. 3LC refers to the tyre’s ‘three layer compound’ which is harder in the middle for ‘linear handling’ and longevity, and softer on the edges for extra feel and ‘camber thrust’ (or grip, in English). Multi-compound tyres aren’t uncommon, but what sets the T31s apart is the cap and base construction, which sees the harder rubber, from the centre, run underneath the softer rubber on the edge offering a combination of grip and stability.