Goodyear Eagle All-Season Tubeless Road Tyre

The new Goodyear Eagle All-Season Tubeless tyres are durable and hardwearing, with good grip on wet roads and impressive anti-puncture qualities. They're also easy to install. The price, while high, is about the going rate for a high-quality tubeless tyre.

• Pros: Easy to fit, grippy, durable
• Cons: Not much so far

Goodyear last made bicycle tyres back in 1976, but last year the US company launched an impressively comprehensive range of road, mountain and gravel tyres that all had one thing in common: tubeless.

The Eagle All-Season on test is the only slick road tyre in the range, coming in four widths from 25 to 32mm. As the name suggests, Goodyear has designed not a wafer-thin race tyre but one that can meet the demands of real-world cyclists riding in all weathers and conditions, who want a fit-and-forget tyre for everything from winter riding to summer sportives.

Goodyear calls it 'Tubeless Complete', sort of a halfway house between Road Tubeless (tyre has an air-retaining inner layer) and Tubeless Ready (regular road carcass and needs sealant), which Goodyear describes as being impenetrable to sealant but not airtight.

Around the carcass is the company's R-Armor protective casing to ward off flints and stones from causing flats, and it's topped off with Goodyear's own Dynamic: Silca4 rubber compound. The tread pattern consists of a slick centre section giving way to a lightly treaded shoulder with deep channels running at an angle along the sides.

Installation of tubeless tyres can be a right nightmare sometimes, enough to send anyone crying back to their inner tubes. With no industry-wide standard, there can be compatibility issues with certain tyre and wheel brand combinations. These Goodyears are among the easier tubeless tyres to install, in my experience.

I've fitted the tyres to a variety of wheel brands and each time the process has been as painless as it gets, the tyre going onto the rims with only a bit of gentle persuasion from a tyre lever in one instance. Inflation via a tubeless track pump popped the tyres straight up onto their beads with the reassuring crack and pop as the beads lock into the rim. Air retention before adding any puncture-resisting sealant was very good, though you could run them without sealant if you wanted.

I had the choice of 25 or 28mm tyres to test and chose the latter. I mainly used them on the new Fulcrum Racing Zero wheels I'm currently testing and fitted to a Cannondale Synapse. It's been a good combination: the large volume tyres provide good comfort and grip and the wheels are light and responsive. Where some tubeless tyres can require regular inflation on an almost daily basis, these held their pressure really well over a much longer period, requiring only irregular pressure checks every week or so.

Goodyear worked with rubber specialist Rubber Kinetics to develop the compound. It's intended to provide 'leading-edge performance in traction, wear, rolling efficiency and puncture resistance'. I don't know about leading edge, but after several months of testing in all conditions the winter can lob my way, the compound has been reliably grippy, very puncture resistant and fast-rolling.

The tyres exhibit a good deal of grip in the wet. Sling the bike into a corner when the rain is hammering down and they feel as safe and secure as any other top performing wet weather tyre. In drier conditions when you can really fly through the bends, they exhibit good speed with low rolling resistance and compare well to my experience with Schwalbe, IRC, Hutchinson and others.

> Buyer's Guide: 9 of the best winter tubeless tyres 

They have also been excellent when it comes to fending off all the puncture-generating debris on the roads at this time of year. In fact, I've yet to puncture, despite my best efforts, riding some of my local gravel tracks to really punish the tyres. A closer look at the tyre before writing this review reveals no damage by way of cuts or tears to the tyre, so they most certainly are durable.

They are on the pricey side – Hutchinson's Fusion 5 All-Season tubeless ready tyres are just £39 – but they're not alone, and you are getting a very well made tyre with that impressive durability and puncture resistance, along with easy installation. Good work, Goodyear.

(I'll update this review in a couple of months time when I've logged a lot more miles to see how they fare.)

Verdict

Tough and durable tyres with good grip and easy tubeless installation