specialized – Texas Cyclist

I’m about to purchase a new set of Dura Ace wheels that are road tubeless compatible, which gives me the option of riding with standard road clinchers and tubes, or riding with road tubeless tires and sealant.

I am a latecomer to tubeless in general, just having discovered it in 2012 and using it on my 29er mountain bike, and on my cyclocross bike. I haven’t suffered a single flat with either bike, although I did suffer through a little bit of burping air loss with the cyclocross bike when I was trying to determine how low of a pressure that I could run. Once I stopped going too low on the pressure, it has worked flawlessly for me.

One of the first things I have noticed with tubeless tires in general is that your choices get pretty limited. With mountain bikes, you have a lot of options, because that’s where tubeless got big first. With cyclocross, the number of options starts to narrow. And with road tubeless, you are SERIOUSLY limited in choices for tires.

The worst part, to me, is that most of the road tubeless tires only come as a 700 x 23 option, while I greatly prefer a 700 x 25 tire. I understand that you can run road tubeless at 85 to 95 pounds and get a fairly comfortable ride that way. But I really like having the extra little bit of rubber on the road. Only a few manufacturers currently offer 700 x 25 options that I could find, and I have heard complaints that the Hutchinson “25” actually just measures 23.5.

As long as I did all the research, I figured I might as well share it with everyone else who is looking into tire options for road tubeless.

If I have left anything out, or if you have opinions and feedback about any of these tires, please leave a comment and share!

Hutchinson Road Tubeless Tires

Hutchinson is the current leader in road tubeless, with more experience and more models than anyone else. They currently make three different road tubeless tires. The Atom, the Fusion 3, and the Intensive.

The Hutchinson Atom tire is the racing road tubeless model. It is the lightest tire that they make, at 270 grams. It only comes in 700 x 23.

Single compound for lightweight performance
Slick type competition profile delivers a very fast tire
Slick competition tread
Performance 127 tpi casing
Carbon beads provide ride flat safety

The Hutchinson Fusion 3 is slightly heavier, at 290 grams. It also only comes in a 700 x 23 option. It is designed to wear a little better than the “competition only” Atom tire, so it should theoretically last longer.

Competition slick profile
Triple Compound: Excellent compromise between output/grip/longevity
127 TPI
Carbon beads for maximum safety

The Hutchinson Intensive is the “heavy duty” tire of the three road tubeless options, and the only one that comes with a choice of 700 x 23 or a wider 700 x 25. It weighs 320 grams in the 700 x 25 option.

Thermoplastic Reinforced compound for maxiumum wear
Slick competition tread
Performance 127 tpi casing
Carbon beads for ride flat safety

Bontrager Road Tubeless

New to the road tubeless tire market in 2012 or 2013 is Bontrager, with the introduction of their TLR tire, which stands for Tubeless Ready Road. It is available in a 700 x 23, and also a 700 x 25. I found a review of the tire on the Slow Twitch site, which was positive. I could not find the weight on it.

TubeLess Ready (TLR) Road tires increase ride comfort and reduce fatigue
TLR Road tires improve cornering traction
TLR Road tires remove the fear of pinch flats due to the lack of tubes
Integrated sub-tread puncture protection (Hard-Case Lite)
Light and supple casing provides low rolling resistance
Optimized for use with Bontrager TLR Sealant
Covered by Bontrager’s Unconditional Performance Guarantee

Schwalbe Road Tubeless

New for 2013 is Schwalbe’s first tire in the road tubeless category. It’s a tubeless version of their Ultremo tire. It comes in one size, 700 x 23. But it comes in several color options, if colors are important to you. This is the tire that I would have loved to go with in a 700 x 25, but alas, not this year. Weight is reported as 295 grams, with a pressure range of 85 to 130 psi.

Maxxis Road Tubeless

This is one that I had never heard of, although it has been around for a while. The Maxxis Padrone road tubeless tire comes in 700 x 23 only, at 295 grams.

I-MAX
Silkworm Puncture Protection
High-strength carbon fiber bead
Dual Compound Tubeless Technology

IRC Tires Road Tubeless

IRC Tires is a brand that I was not familiar with, and they have just come out with four different new road tubeless tire models for 2013. These tires are made in Japan.

The Roadlite model is the heaviest model, with the thickest tread. It comes in both a 700 x 23 and a 700 x 25 size. They weigh 310 and 345 grams, respectively. The 700 x 23 model comes in red, white, and black. The larger one in black only.

The Formula Pro with X-Guard belt is the puncture resistant racing tire. It comes in a 310 grams, and only comes in 700 x 23.

The Formula Pro Tubeless RBCC tire tries to find a balance between light weight, grip, and wearability. It weighs 290 grams, and comes in 700 x 23 only. It comes in gray and red options.

The Formula Pro Tubeless Light is the lightest tire in their lineup, and one of the lightest road tubeless tires on the market, at 240 grams. Save it for race day!

Specialized Road Tubeless Tires

Specialized only makes one road tubeless tire, and it’s a 700 x 23 or 700 x 25 “endurance” road tire called the Roubaix Road Tubeless. It’s in the normal range of road tubeless tire weights at 295 grams, so I’m not sure why they call it endurance. This is a tire I will consider training on, if I can find it available anywhere.

In the end, I’m probably going to choose between the Bontrager and the Specialized tire, and go with a 700 x 25.

Did I miss anything? Have you ridden any of these tires? Leave a comment!

I’ve gone through a lot of water bottles since the 1980s, when I first started cycling. Back then, water bottles were pretty much all the same, for years and years. A really small top connected to the bottle with a piece of plastic, which made it hard to clean the bottle and hard to add any ice to the bottle if you liked to keep things cool in hot weather.

One of the more recent advances in water bottles was when Camelbak came out with their first traditional water bottle (as opposed to hydration packs). Named the Camelbak Podium, it was a bottle with an extremely wide mouth, and a terrific valve that you could twist to keep completely shut (and leak free). The valve was also very soft and easy on your teeth.

That first generation of Podium bottles was perfect except for two fatal flaws, in my opinion. The first flaw was that the plastic was too slippery, so it was very easy to drop the bottle out of your hand. And the second fatal flaw was that the flow rate was much too slow. The plastic was quite hard, so you’d really have to squeeze it to get much water out of it at all. I think this is also part of the reason it was so slippery. I think they have probably resolved those issues with subsequent generations of that bottle, but I wasn’t willing to spend the money to try them again. I will say that their lid and valve design is world class!

Specialized Purist 26 ounce water bottle — This is the standard 26 ounce Specialized Purist water bottle, which is almost as good as the HydroFlo.

I picked up my first redesigned Specialized water bottle a couple of years ago, at Bicycle Sport Shop in Austin. It was a 26 ounce Purist water bottle, which was the best water bottle I had ever used at that point in time. I bought five or six of them over the next year.

The plastic was a good thickness so that you could get plenty of water. It was also a good type of plastic that wasn’t too hard to squeeze, and would easily stay in your hand without getting too slippery. And it had a new type of lid and valve called the Watergate, with the self sealing “Heart Valve.” Those two terms are a bunch of marketing speak, but they do describe a truly better design. You can keep the valve of the water bottle open and turn the bottle upside down, but water would not leak out until you actually squeezed the bottle.

If the way the valve worked wasn’t awesome enough, they also made it so that a generous stream of water came out when you did squeeze it. This was a terrific bottle, and I didn’t think that you could really make anything better than the Purist.

But I was wrong.

Because a year or so after I discovered the Purist and was using it exclusively, I spotted a DIFFERENT Specialized water bottle at the bike shop. It was slightly smaller than the Purist. It had the same amazing lid and valve. But when you picked it up, it felt rubbery and soft and awesome in my hand. It was even grippier than the Purist, and it could squirt water out even faster with the softer material.

This new bottle, of course, is the Specialized Purist HydroFlo 23, which holds 23 ounces of liquid instead of 26 ounces. Although I’d love to have 3 more ounces of liquid, I am willing to settle for less to use this terrific bottle.

An unusual feature about this bottle is that it isn’t round. It is a three sided bottle, sort of like a rounded off triangle. You don’t really notice that it isn’t round, except that the rounded corners fit really well in your hand, giving you a superior grip.

The reason that Specialized calls these bottles “Purist” is because they supposedly have some kind of coating or plastic design or something that keeps them from getting that disgusting “funky water bottle” taste that you sometimes get with older water bottles.

I’ve found that they clean out pretty well. When I use them with Hammer Nutrition HEED or Perpetuem, I typically just rinse them out with cold or hot water as soon as I am finished with my ride, and then leave them upside down to drip dry before my ride the next day. If I fill them up with water the next day instead, they are typically taste free unless I did a bad job of rinsing them out.

Every few weeks I’ll run them through the dishwasher, just to make sure they get a real cleaning every once in a while.

I’m going to quote some of the stuff that Specialized says about the bottle.

FLEX: Thanks to ultra flexible walls, Hydroflo delivers a tidal wave of water. The secret is our next generation resin, engineered to be durable, super flexible and ultra clear. A fine-tuned design provides increased leak resistance and ensures the bottle stays in your cage, even on the toughest roads

SAFE: Hydroflo is 100-percent recyclable, FDA approved, BPA free and indpendently tested and approved by SGS.

FIT: Hydroflo’s unique, three-sided shape fits perfectly in your hand for a solid, controlled grip. The design reduces the chance you will drop your bottles through a perfect ergo hold.

PURE: To deliver a pure water taste, Hydroflo is infused with Purist. Using technology inspired by nature’s lotus leaf, Purist shields the bottle from odor, staining and mold buildup, so all you taste is pure water every time.

I want to make it clear that I paid full retail price at a bike shop for all of my Specialized water bottles. I am not writing this because someone asked me to, or because someone gave me free bottles in exchange for a review. I genuinely love the Purist HydroFlo 23!

You should go buy a couple right now, and then leave a comment on the blog after you have tried them for yourself. My guess is that you’ll be thanking me in the comments.

Tag: specialized

Road Tubeless Tires: the available options for 2013