Just before the 2019 Tour across Bavaria, I'd worn out all my Michelins and my Fairweather by Traveler tires. I replaced them with Continental GP5000 700x32 tires because those were the only high quality bicycle tires in that size I could find at the time. They survived the tour just fine and also did find for day touring, commuting to school, and all sorts of rides.
Then, at around 3500 miles on the tires, while climbing alpine road the rear tire blew out. Fortunately it was a climb, so we could stop the bike. We had to call Xiaoqin to deliver a new tire to us, and I rotated the front to back.
For reference, my previous Michelin 700x28s would last 1000 miles on the same bike, so to get 3X the life in exchange for about 2X the price is a good deal. On the other hand, a blow out can easily cause all sorts of injuries so my preference would be for a tire that only lasted 1200 miles, but didn't blow up spectacularly for the same price.
Michelin now makes the Power Road TLR in 700x32, which looks attractive, but it's a much heavier tire. I will run through my remaining stock of GP5000s and hope someone makes a decent lightweight 700x32 tire.
1 comment:
my favorite lightweight 32 is the Rene Herse Stampede Extralight. I get fairly good mileage (~3k miles), few flats, and best of all - they corner beautifully and have a very compliant ride. I had been using Gatorskins prior which is a tough tire and get good mileage but the difference in ride quality and handling was amazing. I really never thought a bike tire could make that much difference. The Rene Herse is made by Panaracer and is based on the Panaracer GravelKing which is much cheaper. Rene Herse makes a few design changes and charge almost twice as much. A couple friends love the Gravel King but I've stuck with the Rene Herse (formerly Compass) due to having such good luck with them reliability-wise and loving how they perform.
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