While it’s hard to argue that riding in winter has the same allure as the sun-baked and dusty trails of summer, but if you get the right winter tyres fitted to your bike, it needn’t be full of slip-sliding heart-in-mouth moments. Here’s what you need to know to get the right set for you.
Updated February 2016
What should I look for in a winter tyre?
There’s a huge variety of different kids of winter tyre, covering the entire gamut from models with steel spikes designed to grip in ice to narrow lightweight items designed to cut through the mud of a cross country course. What you need depends very much on how and where you ride, but we’ll cover the key features below.
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Just as in summer tyres, having the correct rubber compound is crucial to performance. The compound dictates how hard the rubber is and it’s measured as a durometer. A very soft compound tyre would be around a 40a durometer and would give you masses of traction, even in very wet conditions. As rubber gets harder as it gets colder, a soft compound tyre will retain more grip even when it’s freezing outside.
The downside to a soft compound is that it creates much more drag and therefore rolling resistance. It will also wear much faster and the soft knobs will tend to move about more and can give a vague feeling to the handling on hardpacked trails. A harder compound doesn’t have these problems, but they can give very unpredictable handling in the wet and so are best avoided for winter use on the whole.
A good compromise is a multi-compound tyre that uses harder rubber in the centre to reduce rolling resistance and a softer one at the edges to give good cornering grip. The downside is that these tend to be more expensive than single compound tyres.
Show me some tyres!
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