Goodyear goes back to roots making bicycle tyres

Goodyear has launched a full range of road, urban, gravel and mountain bike tyres. Goodyear's first ever tyre was actually a bicycle tyre, produced way back in 1898, but since then the US company has focused primarily on tyres for cars, trucks, aeroplanes, even the moon buggy, and has a strong interest in motorsports. It stopped producing bicycle tyres in 1976 but has now decided to get back into the bicycle tyre business.

The new range covers mountain biking, gravel, cyclocross, urban commuting and road cycling categories with nine models in total. We’ll just focus on the road, gravel and urban tyres here.

The Eagle All-Season (£60) is the top-end road tyre, designed for year-round cycling including wet weather performance. The tyre is tubeless-ready, has R-Armor protective casing and Dynamic:Silca4 compound, and is available in four widths from 25 to 32mm.

The Transit Speed (£34-£50) is an urban commuting tyre available in 35, 40 and 50mm widths in a choice of three constructions - tubeless-ready with a bead-to-bead breaker, and the S3 and Secure which both use a wire bead with a 3mm under tread protection for the former and a 5mm under tread protection and protective sidewalls for the latter.

The Transit Tour (£34-£50) is apparently based on the company’s Assurance All-Season car tyre, and uses much of the same technology as the Transit but with a different tread pattern and the option of a 650bx50mm size.

Moving on to what might be considered gravel and adventure tyres, the County (£50-£60) is designed to be good on any surface with widely spaced side knobs and a smooth centre tread section. It only comes in a 35mm width and is tubeless-ready with R:Armor full protection casing and Dynamic: Silica4 and A/T compounds.

The Connector (£50-£60) is designed for more off-road action with a tightly spaced arrangement of blocks and more aggressive shoulder blocks. It’s only available in a 40mm width, and has the same rubber and casing tech as the County and is also tubeless-ready.

All about the compound

Perhaps fuelled by the unexpected success enjoyed by Pirelli relaunching a bicycle tyre range, Goodyear has partnered with Rubber Kinetics to develop rubber compounds and casings designed to provide “leading-edge performance in traction, wear, rolling efficiency and puncture resistance.”

Goodyear says in its press release that developing its own compounds gives it an advantage over the many tyre brands it reckons don’t develop their own compounds. For the road tyres where the focus was on high levels of grip, excellent rolling resistance and long-lasting durability, ir developed compounds called Dynamic:Pace 70, Dynamic:H/T and Dynamic:Silica4. Sounds good, but it doesn’t give much away about what these names actually allude to.

It has also focused on the casing construction and puncture protection. To that end it has developed two constructions - Premium and Ultimate - to deliver different levels of puncture protection and casing durability to suit the different requirements. There are different levels of puncture protection, from bead-to-bead, centre casing and centre underlayment, as well as different weight nylon material used.

That's a quick first look on the new range of Goodyear bicycle tyres, we'll try and get some in for review soon so we can see if they're any good and how they compare to the big rivals.