Originally Posted by
Kojak
Big Apples work great on a MTB frame, but for the wet I'd get the Big Apple Liteskin. The compound is stickier in the dry and the wet.
Beyond that, as Andy K has stated, the Supremes are excellent wet weather tires.
As for tread patterns and their impact on wet weather riding; any tread pattern that reduces the amount of rubber in contact with the road decreases the grip of the tire. Our website covers this a bit, but this could be viewed as biased and self-serving. So, I'll defer to Sheldon Brown (RIP good man) who wrote:
Tread for on-road use
Bicycle tires for on-road use have no need of any sort of tread features; in fact, the best road tires are perfectly smooth, with no tread at all!
Unfortunately, most people assume that a smooth tire will be slippery, so this type of tire is difficult to sell to unsophisticated cyclists. Most tire makers cater to this by putting a very fine pattern on their tires, mainly for cosmetic and marketing reasons. If you examine a section of asphalt or concrete, you'll see that the texture of the road itself is much "knobbier" than the tread features of a good quality road tire. Since the tire is flexible, even a slick tire deforms as it comes into contact with the pavement, acquiring the shape of the pavement texture, only while in contact with the road.
People ask, "But don't slick tires get slippery on wet roads, or worse yet, wet metal features such as expansion joints, paint stripes, or railroad tracks?" The answer is, yes, they do. So do tires with tread. All tires are slippery in these conditions. Tread features make no improvement in this.
Here is a link to the article he wrote on bicycle tires.... very illuminating.
http://www.sheldonbrown.com/tires.html
If only all roads were just nice smooth pavement and we never had to go off those Utopian roads, we wouldn't need tread patterns.
But sorry, I ain't found Utopia yet.
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