Saturday, December 02, 2017

Minus Ten Review- 48

Remember those goofy triangular knobs?
Ten years ago this week I was scrambling just like I am this week to get in some last minute testing for review purposes. Some things never change.

Anyway, 29"er tires were the topic of the week, for the most part. We had Schwalbe Racing Ralph 2.4's come in and I was hinting that Continental would finally have some real 29"er tires as they were set to introduce the 2.4" Mountain King. It was an odd tire with triangular knobs and at first, it was really undersized. Funny thing was that if you dared to set them up tubeless, (and I did), they stretched out to be just a hair over 2.4" wide. Weird! They were knid of squirmy in corners and off cambers, and Conti didn't stick with this design very long before they pulled it and introduced an updated design with more traditional squarish knobs.

The Racing Ralph, on the other hand, was awesome. It was big, voluminous, and the knobs worked decently well. We really liked it on our single speed bikes here. Too bad they weren't tubeless. They were great on packed snow though. I'll have more on that in a future "Minus Ten Review".

The "Rear View 2007" kicked into gear, (as it will for 2017 soon), and I was reminiscing about the major bicycle related events of the year. Sea Otter backed up by Trans Iowa v3 was.......stupid. I did that one other time and then I pushed Trans Iowa out to the first week of May once, a never again done time for Trans Iowa, all because doing Sea Otter the weekend before Trans Iowa was so draining. After 2009, I never went back to the Otter mostly due to being involved in Trans Iowa.


1 comment:

Joe Partridge said...

I loved those Conti Mountain Kings in mud! I ran the 2.4 up front the 2.1 in back for years.