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Product review: Schwalbe Ultremo 700x23 bicycle tires
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Velonews has a crack technical team and I was highly impressed by the product review they produced last year on Schwalbe’s supposedly flat-proof yet light-weight tire, the Ultremo R. My tire of choice for the last 2 years has been the Bontrager Race Lite Hardcase road tire. The Hardcase has been very flat resistant with good feel and excellent wear resistance. At 260g per tire, they’re not heavy, but when a respected technical resource like Velonews touts a much lighter tire by claiming it has high flat resistance, it’s tempting to make a change.
And so I did. But after going through 3 Ultremo’s in less than 3 months, it’s clear that the Ultremo is not a training tire. It might be a great race tire if you have mobile support, but for any race where you have to depend on your equipment, this tire is not a good choice.
Averaging less than 500 miles per tire is not a good bargain either, especially as the Ultremos are priced at $60.00 and up. Worse, though, was the utter failure of the tires to actually protect against flats. Although I was named Dr. Flat many years ago for very good reasons (including 7 flats on one century ride), the past few years have been fairly benign in that regard. Perhaps the recently cast-aside Bontragers had something to do with that good fortune. The Ultremos took me back to the bad old days when every ride was made doubly stressful by the ongoing fear of that dreaded hissing sound. With the Ultremos not only did I suffer compression flats, I also sucked up two goatheads that easily made it though the vaunted Kevlar belt.
Flats (as in road terrain) are a good thing at the end of a 200K ride, but flats on a weekly basis are untenable. Still, it was tempting to give Schwalbe a break and accept the possibility that these tires were made strictly for racing and the actual act of riding on them for training purposes might be violating the spirit of the tire’s raison d’etre. But after thumping home on a seriously bulged out rear tire yesterday, all attempts at understanding vanished. A cyclist whom I happened to encounter at a stop light was duly impressed that anyone could be stupid enough to ride on such an acutely deficient tire. I tried to assure him that the tire was perfectly fine when I left home less than 20 miles earlier, but my explanations appeared to make no headway when it came to his assessment of my mental acuity.
If the last of my ill-fated Ultremos can persevere for a few hundred more miles, I’ll be able to bid them good riddance as I change back to the Bontrager Hardcases. On a 1 to 5 scale, the Ultremos rate no more than a 1. Positives: lightweight; negatives: everything else.
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