these are the MITAS E-07's and they are the best adventure
motorcycle tire I've ever used to define what is the best tire first you have to
define the mission and my mission is adventure riding for me adventure means
a heavily loaded bike on the interstate it means curvy corner mountain roads
long gravel stretches but more than anything it means I need a tire that's
gonna perform well in grippy nasty dirty sand gravel muck trails because that's
where I love to go riding and this tire does all of that quite well and in fact
off-road it performs better than a lot of the knobby tires that I've used on
these bikes the best way to put it is it is perfectly mediocre
at everything and quite good on the trail let's start up one of the biggest
debates in motorcycle tires fat versus narrow I'm a fan of narrow tires I want
it to be narrow so it cuts through the mud through the sand through the muck
and grabs the traction that's buried down below and these tires are
exceptionally narrow for their size this one which is a 150 only measures out in
141 millimetres wide which makes it very narrow when I'm off road if I get up on
top of mud or sand or or muck the tire will float back and forth being less
stable what I want to do is dig down through and cut and grab what's at the
bottom with the narrow tire that means I have more pounds per square inch
traction is more about pressure on the ground than surface area so if I have a
tire that has two inches of contact patch and I have 500 pounds sitting on
top of that that means that's 250 pound per square inch if I have a smaller tire
with only one inch of contact and that's safe 500 pounds is on top that means I
have 500 pounds per square inch with a narrow tire and with a lot of pounds per
square inch it's more likely to drive that tire down into the bottom and grab
the traction down below the other places comes into play is one I'm on the trail
and I hit things like water on the street it's very unlikely for a
motorcycle to hydroplane because it's such a narrow contact patch and it's a
very thin layer of water but on the trail it can be an inch thick it could
be a foot deep and with a narrow tire it's more likely to drive through that
water and get to the bottom this is why when you go onto the trail so you look
at dedicated dirt bikes they're all running very narrow 90/90-21 or 190/21
inch tires there's skinny that can cut down and grab what they need this tire
feels more like a dirt bike tire than even the nobbies I've run on this
the E-07 works very well on pavement I'm getting eight thousand to ten thousand
miles out of a set of tires depending how far you want to run them down to the
tread in the heat the tires stick very well feels almost as good as any Street
tire I've ever run in the cold I'm not running that aggressive anyways and I've
never felt any exceptional slip or slide or anything just related to the
temperature what I really like about them on the road is the transition these
tires because they're narrow transitions the bike very very quickly and
aggressively and make the bike fill half the weight of what it actually is the
only downfall to use these on the road is they do carry over some of the same
attributes as a knobby tire which means at speed or with the heavy load the bike
is likely to have kind of a little bit of a walk where you'll feel the
handlebars move as the tread flexes underneath you there's a little bit of
noise and there's a little bit of vibration but it's less than the
Heidenau k60 Scouts and definitely far less than a pure knobby like the TKC-80
or the Kenda Big Blocks the E-07is an exceptional tire on the trail it has a
nice large tread block where it swings the mud out I very seldom how these
tires pack up it has to be clay or very sticky in which case any tire is gonna
pack up they have very deep tread on them which
means I can stutter if I'm in the snow they're deep enough
to do that they have a long tread life but also each one of these sharp edges
on the tire works to dig in and to grab the ground with enough gap in between
where it can get down inside and there's a balance between having too large a gap
and being so tight that it can't catch an edge
the E-07 just like the Heidenau k60 scouts are renowned for being a very
stiff tire and very difficult to mount and dismount but that shouldn't dissuade
you that should encourage you to go after this if your adventure is the same
as mine the reason is that stiff sidewall is what helps protect you if
the tire gets low if you hit a really sharp edge or if you end up getting a
flat tire and it runs all the way down you're less likely to damage your rim
and your bike also this bead on the tire seats very very stiff just like the rest
of the wallet once it sits on there it's very difficult to break the bead but
again if you run out of air or you hit something very hard it's less likely to
pop off the bead and damage the rim don't look at that as a negative that's
a positive that's one of the things that makes this such an exceptional off-road
tire
the MITAS E-07's are a great value with the high performance and high
mileage that they put out these are the best adventure tire I've ever used