Kestevan said:
The city jets are a damn fine slick tyre. If you only want to ride on tarmac they are brilliant.
They get very slippy on grass/gravel though - hence my other half has just changed over to Schwalbe land cruisers. Same price and almost as good on-road, with just a bit more grip on the canal paths.
She seems well impressed with them.
Funnily enough, I put a pair of the land cruisers on last week -
Wiggle were doing them for just over £8 each!!
I'd had the Schwalbe Jimmys that I used last winter on for a few weeks prior to that and then noticed I'd got a big old split forming across the tread on the front, and the sidewall going at the back.
As the weather's not been wet down here for ages I thought I'd try the land cruisers out as a compromise and at that price it was definitely worth a shot.
First impressions are that they roll a whole bunch better than the Jimmys (no surprises there!) and probably aren't a lot worse than the City Jets in that respect .. that's mostly subjective in that it's been a month since I used the City Jets, but slightly objective in that my average times on the LCs (ha ha!) have so far been similar to that on the Jets, and better than the Jimmys. I've only got a few days worth of data on them (~50 miles) though so not committing yet. Still, I'm running them at 60psi, compared to 80 on the Jets, so I'm prepared to sacrifice a bit of speed / effort for comfort.
They didn't scare me on wet roads yesterday, though there was once or twice on mini roundabouts where I wasn't totally confident with the feel from the front. But then this was on freshly drenched roads after no rain for some weeks: always a slip fest. Today, damp roads felt OK. Even so, the slicks would have been better.
I went the "long" way home through the woods last night: downhill, surface mud and some water (it rained all day) over a dry hard-packed sandy base. No worries there. The City Jets would have been *ahem* "interesting" on that surface.
So, the Land Cruisers are a good compromise for the mix of on and off road on my commute: there's a risk of them being "Jack of All Trades" but so far they're working for me. I don't need a full monster off road tyre but (in the winter) need something a bit more than a slick.
Here they are on Wiggle, priced at a bit more than last week. Might be worth a try Inertia. I wasn't going to recommend them to you as I've not used them for long, but as the subjects come up ..
Only issue I've had is on one of the estates I cross: some developer or other decided brickwork paths and roads would be pretty. It made for some "fun" in the wet yesterday: the herring bone pattern they're laid in on the roads was OK, but there's a shared section of path I use to access a bridleway and on there the bricks are just laid in rows: I was squirming about all over the place. I think that centre ridge you can see in the picture was getting a bit hooked up in the "groove" between rows of bricks: it felt like the front had a mind of its own .. most unsettling.
