kissena riders
 

I was at the track ths morning and realized that i have beginings of a hole in my rear tire. Sucks because i barely have any miles on them. Can anyone recommend a set of reasonable priced tires that would be good on the track and on the road.

i forgot to mention that i have clinchers

Vittoria Open CX should be good. I am out of commission til Sept/Oct.

S/F,
CEYA!

Strength and Honor!!

Thanks Ceya. I know that you are a tubular fan but since i have clinchers what do you think about Tufo's tubulars that mount onto clincher rims?

Have a good recovery

I find Vittoria Rubino Pros not a bad tire for road and track use (also have used Open Corsas). They have a nice ride quality, are flat resistant, have a decent thread count (120) and are pretty cheap.

So far they're doing ok on the street, but I haven't ridden them too far. I'm not too sure though I'd want to ride them everyday.

I did spend quite a long time trying to find a good single tire for both but gave up as I hated getting flats. Tires will get slashed and gashed during urban riding so you generally have to go for a heavier tire with a decent flat protection system (Armadillo, Hardcase etc). But these have a poor ride quality and tend to square off over time. Riding Armadillos on the track is not to be recommended. Your backside alone will hate you.

I ended up building a second wheelset to solve this. One does all the heavy duty street riding, the other is used to get me to the track and for training/racing.

The other option of course is to change tires at the track, which IMHO is not worth it unless the banking is steep or its a wooden track.

Ride a good tire in the front, and if you're skidding a lot ride something cheaper in the back. Zaffiro pros are ok for a back tire, currently I have a $15 hutchinson-flash folding bead tire that seems to have a lot of rolling resistance but it is lightweight and wears well. Bought techno-pros from vittoria and they were comlete junk. The open-corsa CX is supple and fast but started to wear out quickly as a back tire so I moved it to the front. I've been very impressed with continentals overall, though can rarely afford them and they never seem to go on sale. Other roadies I know say they last a long time. I've ridden a conti grand-prix supersonic (150 gram tire) on the streets to/from the velodrome and it has held up very well for such a lightweight tire. Putting on a [gasp!] front brake did wonders for the lifespan of my rear tire. But if you do that you have to take of the brake to ride on the track and live with the fact that you're not riding brakeless anymore. :o

PS. have you seen the skid-patch calculators? They tell you how many skid patches are on your tire based on your gear combination. 1 skid patch means that your tire will always be at the same position as your cranks when you're skidding, 6 or more skid patches is better. http://grit.homelinux.net/gi//index.php

Subjective of course, but for me, Vredestein Fortezza and Fortezza Tri-Comp have proven to be the best all-around clinchers (they don't feel quite as good to me as the Michelin ProRace2, but they last a lot longer and for the track you can run a LOT of pressure in them if you so desire (they'll take 175 PSI -- bad for your rims -- but if you're not braking you can run over 130), so they make a lot of sense for the sorta-velodrome-sorta-road-racing surface at Kissena. I'm not a skidder save in case of absolute emergency, so I don't really give that aspect of tire life much thought.

Have you been running the Conti Supersonics or Vittoria Ultraspeeds that came with that Fuji? Those tires feel really great as well, but don't have much of a life expectancy (they're really meant as race-day-only tires), so I wouldn't be surprised if they wore quickly.

Good to hear from another Fuji rider. I still have the Vittoria tires that came on the bike.