BikeInn is legit…order with confidence. Used them multiple times.
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Only challenge is shipping. It’s expensive and they’re slow as … 2 weeks to pack & ship my current order, probably another 2 weeks to arrive (same as last time). That’s ok as I know to expect the latency.
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Yeah there’s always some maths with tyres looking cheap on bike inn but the shipping costs and delay, vs a local store with free or no shipping, plus the “supporting local” tax… Everything I’ve ordered from there has been totally fine, though.
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The contention that RH esque slicks are the best for cornering on gravel is a conclusion reached only by RH. That’s why the citation provided is from a RH website. It’s contrary to the established reality of gravel riders everywhere, not to mention the decades of experience of cross-country mountain bikers. Separate from the traction advantages of having some tread knobs, it also provides significant additional puncture protection. In many instances, knobs keep the sharp surfaces and potential tire-cutting obstacles away from the tire casing, instead of having to rely on the puncture resistance of the tread casing.
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The RH article is wrong, but at least it’s appropriately smug and condescending, as anything RH should be!
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So, are you making an argument that I should be riding slick tires on my mountain bike because I ride on roots and rocks mainly on my trails and not mud or grass? Hmm. I wonder how that would go.
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Far from it - MTB is always muddy here, a slick would be silly. I just find slicks suit much of my gravel riding, much of the time, and semi-slicks, which I have tested, scare the f*ck out of me when pushed hard on tarmac because they do what they do by design. I don’t think my location is unique or mono-surface. I ride everything, and being central scotland we get it all.
Apart from Gerard Vroomen. From OPEN. And the load of pro riders using them and winning/placing high in races like Unbound and SBTGRVL etc.
And what the conclusion is, is that semi-slicks cannot possibly add to cornering if they don’t engage side knobs until the bike is so far over a slide is inevitable. Physics innit.
A soft, supple slick is just as good at gripping many surfaces as a knobbly. And better on some too. And if it’s stupidly muddy, some riders prefer slicks because they don’t clog up.
Amazingly, I just did three hours on loose gravel with 55mm slicks, and - gasp - didn’t fall off once. In fact, got 3 PR’s on twisty fast gravel 4x4 tracks. Even some wet grass.
I appreciate it’s not a widely-accepted view, and people who have been raised on semi-slicks will defend them. 10 years ago 23-25mm tyres at 100psi were the fastest, no argument. That was the accepted view - until it wasn’t, and science proved it. Now pros are riding 30’s and winning.
If the RH line is BS, how come they are wildly over-represented in gravel wins and FKT’s? Yes, Jan is a marketing team of one. I don’t understand why when he has a growing cohort of pro’s choosing to ride his products, he’s not to be believed and all the massed big brands are.
Noting I have no $$$ skin in this game, I just know what works for me, my customers and friends, and how/where we ride.
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You are chasing your position….you said that knobs are only good in a few very limited conditions, but now you are arguing against semi-slicks, which was not the counter-argument made.
Er - I said
I stand by that. And I stand by the assertion that semi-slicks are the worst of both worlds. Because science.
That won’t stop a million semi-slick riders saying I’m wrong, even though the laws of physics say they aren’t even using them in corners because if they were, they’d be sliding. And semi-slicks will always suck on tarmac, because where you can lean them over, you hit the transition point just when you need grip and predictability.
Yay cycling. And confirmation bias. And religiosity.
Again, I’m not making an argument for semi-slicks, so why you keep reverting to that is deflection.
Not deflecting from anything here 
There is a tread pattern that does the job - the RH one. That’s why they have just the one pattern. And it keeps winning races and FKT’s under some of the world’s best racers.
My n=1 is that apart from for reviews, I’ve only ridden the RH knobblies for most of the last decade. Summer, winter, gravel, mud, grass, tarmac, everything. Fast, bikepacking, whatever. They just work. Have you tried them?
What the industry thrives on is the never ending churn and discourse around what tyre for what ride. Any comparison or seeking recommendation of ever-changing tread patterns and construction methods is therefore bunk - because the tyre from even a few years back that you / another loved is likely not the tyre you can buy now.
Another logical fallacy - Appeal to Authority. Just because some racers use them is correlation, not causation. I would also take issue with your assertion that RH tires “keep winning” races, but whatever.
Again, you are not responding to the argument being made. I never said RH knobbies aren’t good tires. What I said was that the idea that knobbies are only required for the limited cases you cited is factually incorrect.
And people say irony is dead. 
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I’m struggling to track with this. You say they’re the best, and then you also say that they’re the only tires you’ve ridden for the past decade. I agree that they’re the best of the tires you’ve ridden, if they’re the only tires you’ve ridden for 10 years. But I didn’t have a sense of the tires that you’ve reviewed.
So I did some research to understand what other tires you’ve reviewed for comparison purposes - because if I were going to say that a set of tires that I rode were the best, I’d want to make sure I had ridden the most popular ones, and the ones everyone else said were “the best” so I’d have a good comparison. I went through the first 25 pages of your road.cc reviews and found 5 tire reviews beyond the 2 RH and 2 Compass tire reviews:
- Bontrager GR1 TLR Team Issue Gravel Tyre in December 2018, 3.5 stars
- Kenda Cholla Pro in September 2017, 4 stars
- Kenda Flintridge Pro in August 2017, 3.5 stars
- Clement X’Plor MSO tyres in July 2017, 4.5 stars
- Maxxis Re-Fuse 27.5 x 2.0 gravel tyre in May 2017, 4 stars.
Based on what you’ve written and the reviews you’ve conducted, it appears there’s a very limited competitive set (n=5), and none of the popular brands from the past 5 years - such as Conti Race Kings or Schwalbe Thunder Burts are included in your comparisons.
So when you say that the RH tires are the best, should I assume there’s an asterisk that says “not compared to the most-used gravel tires in the Lifetime Grand Prix - Continental Race Kings and Schwalbe Thunder Burts”?
Or did I miss something in my research and you’ve run repeatable, documented tests comparing those tires and the RH tires? If you have those, I’d love to see them!
I’m trying to put it all in writing so that we can all be on the same page here.
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Seeing how we’re all into provable facts, maybe you could spend a few minutes perusing the RH blogs where he lists all the wins and the riders using nothing else. Sofiane S, Ted King, Lael Wilcox et al. It’s pretty impressive. And seeing how RH must have about 0.000001% of the gravel tyre market, all the more so.
So not an ‘assertion’, more a ‘fact’. Unless you’re saying the claimed wins/placings and posts from riders are fabricated? I like a good conspiracy as much as the next random guy on the internet, but that’s taking it a bit far.
I’m really not sure what you’re arguing about. I hold that RH knobblies are excellent all-round tyres, that you can ride many surfaces a fair chunk of the time on slicks, and that semislicks are the emperor’s new clothes. Cool?
Kinda weird how the only part of my post that you managed to respond directly to was the one point that I specifically indicated I had no interest in disputing….hence the “whatever”
In the meantime, you continue to sidestep the actual points being made….
Had you simply said that, we would not be having this discussion. But you made a number of questionable claims and statements that are simply factually incorrect.
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Wow, spare time or what! No-one expects the Spanish Inquisition…unless there’s points to be scored on Escape Collective Community
Righto - I ride RH tyres when I’m not being paid to ride anything else.
That list is just my published reviews. Doesn’t include the tyres that were on bikes I’ve reviewed for the other publications I write for under various nom de plumes (a fair number of the names of bike reviewers are made up FYI because they moonlight/freelance).
It also doesn’t include the tyres I rode on loan bikes, friends or customer’s bikes for comparison or testing for issues/after completion, bikes I’ve rented on holiday or work trips, tyres I rode but didn’t get published for whatever reason, etc.
So whilst no-one can claim to have ridden everything, I’m pretty comfortable saying I’ve ridden and forgotten more tyres than most people will ride in a lifetime. As have others in the industry. I offer my experience, that RH tyres are a bloody good shout. I do so to my friends and paying customers, where there’s a hell of a lot more skin in the game and reputation at stake than an internet forum.
I totally accept there may well be folks who have encyclopedic knowledge of every gravel tyre and have invested thousands to purchase and ride them all.
What is it they say about opinions again?
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I just wish I could track with what constitutes a fair comparison for you.
In this post, you say your conclusions are drawn from riding tires on loan bikes, friends bikes, customers bikes, bikes you’ve rented.
But whenever another poster has offered Chung test results, and comparisons that don’t use the same bike or tires with the same weight, grip, size and other factors, you’ve challenged those. See:
and
If what you’re saying is that RH produces a good tire, I think we can all agree with you.
But you opened your first post with:
So this sounds like you believe they’re better than everything else. And you’re absolutely entitled to your opinion, just like everybody else :-).
But the evidence you have to support that opinion is weak, because you use one standard for your comparisons (can be ridden on any bike), and apply a higher standard of comparison to anyone who disagrees with you (must be comparable size, weight, grip on the same bike under test conditions that only RH endorses).
I think it took all of 7 minutes?
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Dude, no-one has ridden everything in even close to laboratory standards. Everyone wants absolutes, because people are so hung up on ‘My favourite brand is the best’ or whatever. Everyone is seeking a Golden Tyre that will make them faster / have fewer flats / whatever. Hence every_single_time someone asks ‘What’s the best gravel tyre’ the responses are a brand soup.
I know for me, RH tyres have consistently outperformed everything else I’ve ridden for the last eight years. But I’m n=1.
For ‘evidence’, apart from all the Tour mag tests and RH’s own roll down tests (which you can argue for or against), fundamentally and incontrovertably they have an outlandish number (for their market share) of world-class riders and wins to their name, that lends credence to the idea that RH are on balance the best gravel tyres, overall and all round.
Maybe they just have a freakishly talented bunch of athletes who could win or place or get FKT’s on $5 Wal-Mart tyres. Dunno. But on balance it’s unlikely.
You may disagree with this logic. That’s fine.
That’s quite the leap. There are very few (were there any at unbound or Traka top 10s this year?) RH tyres at the top end of the latest races, and the over-representation argument is pretty meaningless as a single good rider could use them and that would be true.
Regardless of personal biases though, we’re at a place where there is an ever-increasing mountain of pretty irrefutable evidence when it comes to tyre speed on different types of gravel.
You have to do some more research to decide what is the best tyre based on your own use case and context, for example weight, grip, puncture risk, maximum width your frame can take etc, but if the RH tyres don’t stack up against the latest competitors in Chung tests, then they’re not as fast. Simple as that.
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The fastest tyre is the one with air in it.
And the one that lets the rider stay upright.
Simple lack of rolling resistance is an important but not definitive characteristic. The fastest-rolling tyre possible would also be impossibly fragile in the real world of a race.
Someone should do the numbers. But even if it’s just one rider in the top ten, that would still be a wild overrepresentation compared to market share?