Anybody have an opinion on these?
Thanks,
-Colin
The used to made by Tufo, but I believe the new ones are not. Does Zipp make them? Or are they just relabelled from someone else?
Zipp tires come out of the same factory as Clement, Vittoria and a bunch of others. They are good tires, but not really any better than any others.
I think everybody likes to focus on the point of manufacture on these and not on the design details that make them special. The selling point on this tire is that it uses a 300tpi microfiber casing and latex tube for the ultimate suppleness and handling that a roadie would ask for in a road or criterium tire (plus a kevlar puncture resistant belt), but has a specifically developed tread shape that has no ‘lip’ or protrusion where the tread meets the casing. Years of testing have shown us that this lip is a cause of drag, and in some wheel designs can cause separation of the airflow which keeps aerodynamic rims from performing optimally, so we designed a special tread pattern and shape that eliminates this. In all it really depends on the rim type and shape as to how necessary this feature is, but as a general rule the lip can elimnate 0.02-0.05 lbs of drag per wheel in wind tunnel testing, that’s more drag reduction than you would get from reducing the number of spokes by 6, so it’s not going to make you a superstar, but since you need tires anyway, it’s like free speed, and without making your wheels into 12 spoke floppy noodles that only 120 lb guys can ride. And if all that tech stuff doesn’t sell them, they also have black base tape instead of white, so they look REALLY cool.
The best description of these tires would not be ‘good but not really any better than any others’ as Chris said, as much as ‘equivalent in manufacturing quality to the finest tubulars available, but with added engineering for higher performance’.
Josh, you say " ultimate suppleness and handling that a roadie would ask for in a road or criterium tire ". So would you recommend this tire for TTs as well? What about the Vittoria crono, which I am concerned may be too fragile and narrower than what you recommend for a 404?
tttiltheend
Yeah, I guess I sort of didn’t finish what I was saying in my first message. I meant to say that the tires were super supple for ultimate handling like you would want in a crit or road race, but have the ultimate in low rolling resistance and aerodynamics that you want in a TT tire. The thing that makes our rims different, is that they work best at around 21mm width, so traditional TT tires generally don’t work as well as they tend to be ‘aero’ by being more narrow than usual and often times very light, this also leads many TT tires to be too fragile for most real world TT courses, and definitely for triathlon use. A superlight tire that gets you a puncture can in no way be fast enough otherwise to offset the one time it leaves you stranded, particularly when weight is not a factor in TT or tri use, except in maybe some very special circumstances. What we have tried to do is blend the best of all the worlds into a tire that can do it all, or most all of what we want. Granted, you can’t ride Paris-Roubaix with it, and it isn’t under 200 grams, but in 95% of all real world situations, this tire will be faster because of it’s overall design than any other tire due to a blend of high casing TPI, low rolling resistance, latex tube (for lower rolling resistance and good puncture resistance), and superior aerodynamics (which as far as we know make it the first aerodynamically designed tire on the market ).
The other thing that make our tires cool, is that they are integrated into the design process with our rims and wheels, so that the tires were originally developed to work well with the 404 and disc, but we have now developed 2 generations of 404 and the 808 using these tires in our wind tunnel study (as well as Vittoria CX and Hutchinson Team Tubulars from CSC, though they are now vittoria sponsored) so that the tires and rims are literally designed to work optimally together. Of course, the same principles hold for the tires on other rims, just the little details are even more optimised with our rims. Most companies could not sell a 21mm TT tire as people generally think they need an 18 or 19mm tire to be ‘aero’ but in our case, our rims work optimally with 21-22mm tires, so we can sell an aerodynamically optimised TT tire that has a super high quality casing and puncture resistance strip that allow it to be an optimal road tire as well. This is a huge benefit for road racing or long tri usage as you are not making sacrifices in durability or handling for aero performance.
Mine work well on my 808’s…
Josh, a great sales pitch, if I may say so, and I mean that as a genuine compliment, not ironically. Good point about the time penalty with ultralight tires, if they don’t get you to the finish they might as well be made of cement. My first assumption would be that a lighter tire would be thinner and therefore more likely to have lower rolling resistance, although I’m sure that is not necessarily true, the 100-150 grams saved otherwise gets lost in the noise.
I must say, it doesn’t seem like many vendors carry your tires, maybe they need to read your posts!
rmur,
Good point about the clinchers, however, we have sort of designed ourselves out of the clincher tire market by designing our clincher rims with very different shapes than our tubular rims. The clincher rims have a wider aerodynamic width (the bulge in the sidewall) than the tubular rims, and are therefore designed to work optimally with 20-23mm tires already available on the market. The original impetus for making the tubular tire was to fabricate a tire that worked optimally with the disc, since that really represents the ultimate in aero performance and the one product where every miniscule detail really is super critical…we of course made sure it worked with the tubular rims of the time, but since we have redeveloped and re-tooled our rim shapes two times since the tire introduction 3 years ago, we were able to really tweak the rim shapes to work even better with the tires, so that we now feel we have found every miniscule drop of efficiency in the rim/tire combination.
Since clincher tires can readily be had without a tread lip or discontinuity at the tread/casing junction (the thing we had identified as the number one issue in poor tire/rim aero interaction), we just went about designing our clincher rims to work best with those tires available on the market, therefore I don’t think we really have any killer technology or innovation to bring to the clincher tire market (although some day we may learn something new…). We have no desire to really be in the tire market as we don’t have the ability to make them internally, and can never compete on cost with a product where our competitor is also the guy making the tires for us, so we have to occupy a niche where the design intent and specification of the tire is very specific and represents some real world gain to offset the slightly higher price (which we feel it does without a doubt on our tubular tires), otherwise, we would just be selling a similar product as somebody else, but with our name on it for $10 more, and that’s definitely not what we’re about.
For those of you with Zipp clinchers, you want a 20-23mm clincher with smooth tread to sidewall transition, and for optimum rolling resistance use a latex tube.
OK, I’ll bite…
How does the tube material affect rolling resistance??
Josh, your site doesn’t seem to say. Are these tubulars 700c only?
Josh, Why do Zipp tubulars have such a low pressure rating?
I won’t speak for Josh, but I wonder if the boys at Zipp know that EVERYBODY always pumps their tires up to MAX, so they put the optimum pressure as the max, knowing that people would put at least that much in.
That’s just a guess, though.
Rappstar is sort of right…we publish the optimal pressure on the tire and not the MAX pressure. The MAX pressure is simply a function of the bursting pressure of the tire, and has nothing to do with grip or rolling resistance. The rolling resistance curve for a tire is sort of an inverted bell shape with RR on the Y axis and pressure on the X axis, such that you acheive minimum RR at some pressure, and adding pressure to that is now increasing the RR of the tire. For most tire constructions the minimu RR occurs between 105 and 125 depending on rider weight. I’ve pasted below a portion of a piece I wrote which was printed on Velonews and agreed with by Lennard Zinn explaining some of the physics here:
"…The bigger issue is that most every tire on the market runs at optimal rolling resistance between 105 and 125psi. We have attained data from most manufacturers and had numerous talks with others to learn that nylon cased tires like Michelin or Continental run optimally around 105-115 and cotton or bias cased tires like Vittoria or Vredestein tend to run optimally at 115-125 maybe as high as 130 for Vredestein, but actually will increase in rr at higher pressures due to the tread rubber beginning to fail in shear as it locally deforms to meet the contour of the road imperfections when the casing is too rigid. Not only is there higher rr, but faster tire wear as well. We have pushed tire manufacturers to list a recommended pressure and not just a MAX pressure for years (the max pressure is simply a predetermined fraction of the bursting pressure of a given tire as set out by industry standards and has nothing to do with the pressure you should run) but they are between the rock and hard place as consumers continually push for higher and higher pressures feeling that ‘if some is good, more is better’. "
Essentially you need to look at the tire as a spring, like the suspension on a car, where air pressure controls the spring rate. At some point, the pressure is high enough that imperfections in the surface cannot be overcome through tire deflection/displacement and the entire system has to be lifted upwards, which takes a large amount of energy. Imagine that you have a series of 2mm high sticks you are running over, ideally you want the tire to deflect 2mm so that there is no energy expended to lift the bike and rider over the sticks. Of course, we want some minimum pressure so that we don’t pinch flat or damage anything, but assume that at 100psi the tire will deform 1.8mm and the bike/rider is lifted 0.2mm, well at 200psi, the tire deflects 0.9mm and the bike/rider is lifted 1.1mm…it takes quite a bit of energy to lift the entire mass of the bike/rider even small amounts because the frequency at which you are lifting is high…
As for the question about latex tubes, the latex is significantly thinner and more supple than butyl, so there is little to no heat lost in deforming the latex when compared to butyl. The most impressive study I’ve seen on this was by one of the supermileage teams we have developed wheels and hubs for. These are highly designed super efficient vehicles with tiny engines that can acheive 1000+ miles per gallon in competition while averaging about 30mph. One team found an improvement of over 100mpg when changing their 3 wheels from butyl to latex tubes!!!
Josh,
I have a Cervelo P3 with zipp 404 front and 2004 zipp disk, with conti podiums 19mm. What benefit would there be to switching to zipp tire setup.
Paul
The most impressive study I’ve seen on this was by one of the supermileage teams we have developed wheels and hubs for. These are highly designed super efficient vehicles with tiny engines that can acheive 1000+ miles per gallon in competition while averaging about 30mph. One team found an improvement of over 100mpg when changing their 3 wheels from butyl to latex tubes!!!
WHEN CAN I BUY A CAR LIKE THIS??? 
Josh, does Zipp have anything for us little guys that ride 650c bikes? It looked like your site only had 700c tires.
If you do, sign me up.
Thanks for posting. Your posts are always informative.
OK, it sounds great…but when are you going to put out a 650c tire?