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Zaffiros are what is on our hire fleet and I believe the hire bikes at Manchester
It was Zafiro Slicks 700c on all bikes but Conti Gatorskin 650c on the 39cm frames. All those bikes went back to Dolan when the arena refurb began. As a consumable Zafiro slicks couldn't be sourced ahead of the closure, and an alternative hadn't been decided upon. It'll be interesting to see what the new fleet tyres are.
I still have concerns over the lack of a standardised approach across all the indoor Velodromes, following the Newport case in terms of consequences both as a rider (physical) and for track side coaches (legal), and despite raising this with my local venue operator & bc this has gone nowhere afaik.
rhb
M_V
My understanding of the ‘no dual compound’ thing is that it was because the different compounds can separate and delaminate. There is more risk of this because of how you load up the tire, riding on the shoulder when going slowly around the bends.
In Glasgow we are all (coaches, techs, manager) of the opinion that as there is a ‘track’ bit on Conti’s use chart on the tubs but not the clinchers they are saying they don’t do a track suitable clincher.
Those same charts though put the Sprinter firmly in the road and tt columns and not the track one but as I said there’s precedent of them being used.
Their rep has been in touch with us with, I’m led to believe, threats of suing us because we weren’t allowing riders on with sprinters (we’ve now relaxed on that) and their clinchers but when we pointed out the charts on their own website they accepted why we were doing what we were and there was talk of them having the charts changed or annotated.
The Zaffiro Slicks of course aren’t (weren’t) sold as a ‘track’ tyre (neither are the rather more treaded Rubinos that we have on the smallest hire bike, they have a 650 wheel and there are no 650 ‘track’ clinchers nor any tyres that better fit the definition of a track tyre) but the Zaffiros are what is on our hire fleet and I believe the hire bikes at Manchester and maybe Derby too.
In that bit of discussion between the velodrome that I was involved in we talked about how those tyres have been used on several tracks for a long time so there is a good base of evidence that they work. We do not have that base of evidence for other brands/models of tyres.
Is your coach in the employ of the velodrome where you will be using the bike?
Tyres are really still a grey area. Our management wanted to go the route of making a definition of a track tyre - single compound, black rubber (except in the case of a couple of very high end tyres ie dugast) with no or minimal file type tread that is consistent around the whole tyre.
Newport wanted to work with the British Standards Authority or Agency or something to establish a standard for a track tyre but this seemed to hit a dead end pretty quickly.
Of course the ironic thing is that all this attention on tyres is because of a very unfortunate incident that tyres really didn’t play a part in but they were just the one avenue where the lawyers managed to make something stick. We must presume that in any future fatal accident or serious injury enquiry tyres would again be a focus of attention.