BLIND ❯ TYRED AND TESTED

I know what you’re thinking; you’ve turned the page and there is a blindfolded man, clad in leather surrounded by rubber – I realise most of you are probably used to seeing that in all your other magazines, but what is it doing in Fast Bikes? Well, I’ll tell you. We all like riding, that’s a given, and the more we ride, the more rubber we have to throw at our bikes. But with so many tyre manufacturers offering so many different products (each), it can be a hell of a job trying to decide what to punt for.

So as a kind of public service to you, the Fast Bikes reader, we have decided to do a back to back test on six different options of ‘hypersports’ road tyre. And this wasn’t going to be a boring 10,000 mile motorway jaunt to see which tyres have the hardest, most mahogany-like centre, oh no. This needed to be done Fast Bikes style so I threw my long-term test bike, the 2018 Yamaha YZF-R1M, into the back of my van and headed over to Cadwell Park to spin some laps.

Rather than pitch out-and-out trackday or racing tyres against one and other, our aim was to see how normal road tyres perform under knee down, neck wringing trackday conditions. And we had sporty road tyres from all big players; the new for 2018 Pirelli Diablo Rosso Corsa II, Metzeler’s Sportec M7RR developed for fast road riding from their experience in road racing, the soon to be replaced Bridgestone S21, the also new for 2018 Dunlop SportSmart TT, Michelin’s Power RS which also come to us with compounds derived from their expertise in racing, and finally Continental Sport Attack – the only single compound tyres on the test.

We roped in our mates at No Limits Trackdays to help us with the tyre changes, and I dug the cleanest blindfold out of the draw in my