Hey everyone, welcome or welcome back!
Unless you're very new to mountain biking you know how important it is to have good tires on your bikes.
I am no different, I'm always on the lookout for that perfect combination between rolling resistance
cornering grip and ultimately weight.
One of those tires is the Bontrager XR4, it is supposed to be an aggressive trail tire,
let's take a closer look at it!
And I don't know about other things but Trek or Bontragger
likes to mess around with the graphic design of the sidewall of their tires.
Looks like every time I'm looking at Bontrager, the sidewall looks different.
This is a 2021 incarnation of XR4 Team Issue
These are tubeless ready tires and I am looking at a 27.5 x 2.6 tire over here.
You can still see Bontrager here on the sidewall but now is kind of stealth
and these tires are made in Taiwan.
Some might say that they are made in the same factory as the Maxxis tires, can't really confirm that.
And talk about consistency in the graphic design of these tires
this is a 2.4 tire, a rear tire, and the Bontrager is also stealth here on the sidewall
but you're also gonna have the size of the tire something that we didn't have on the 2.6.
Also on the sidewall you're going to get the dimension of the tire
you see that 66 mm 27.5 or 650B so that should be the width of this tire.
And if you continue on you're gonna get to this area where maximum tire pressure is mentioned.
In this case is 40 PSI which is kind of low compared to other tires that I looked at.
And the last thing worth mentioning here is the directional arrow
this is a directional tread tire like many of the current tires in the market.
And all that information that I just mentioned is to be found on both sidewalls of the tire
unlike Maxxis that only prints that information on one side.
Also unlike other tires this has a tread wear indicator - TWI
you can see that little step down here on the center knobs
so when your tire wears to that spot Bontrager consider it is done.
You can find a mention of this TWI right here on the sidewall next to the directional arrow.
Interestingly I have two tires, one is a 2.4 one is a 2.6
the 2.6 is the only one that has that wear indicator the 2.4 doesn't have it.
And the moment I saw this thread pattern all I could think of was the Maxxis Dissector
that I looked at not too long ago.
But it also occurred to me that the design of the xr4 is not that far off the design of the Maxxis Rekon.
And here they are side by side, Dissector, XR4, and Rekon.
You can see the cornering knobs, the shape of them
on the XR4 they are a mix between Rekon and the Dissector.
The Dissector has these blocky cornering knobs
XR4 has that as well but this other type of cornering knobs is very similar to what Rekon uses all around.
You're rolling on two types of knobs the two and the three alternating pattern
and you see this third one being close to the corner knobs and that makes it a nice and roundish type of tire
as opposed to the Dissector that has that clearly visible channel.
The leading edge of this center knobs are tapered just like they are on the Dissector
as for breaking surfaces you can see them over here
again very similar to what the Dissector provides.
If anything this might provide a slightly better braking performance in comparison
Height of the knobs is very similar to what the Dissector provides
and quite a bit bulkier than what Rekon has even though this is a 29 x 2.6 tire.
The stated width of these tires, this is a 2.4, is supposed to be 58 millimeters.
Well, cornering knobs, edge to edge it's a bit over that
so this measures a bit over 60 mm which is 2.38"
The 2.6 tire ETRTO is 66 mm you can see it here almost 66 millimeters
and that's 2.57", again this is a 2.6 tire
and the cornering knobs are definitely wider than the actual casing or the sidewall of the tire.
The center or the rolling knobs of these tires are a bit over 3 mm tall
and the corneting knobs are about 2 mm taller
5.5 millimeters, that's the same on both 2.6 and 2.4 tire.
And the last dimension you might be interested in is the height of this tire
I'm measuring 85 mm but this is a 25 mm rim so we're talking about 60 mm height on the 2.6 tire
the 2.4 is a couple of millimeters shorter as you see it over here (58mm).
And I'm sure you want to hear about the weight of these tires
the 27.5 x 2.6 is supposed to be 860 grams, that's the spec.
Well this one comes to 848g so a bit under that, the 29er tire is supposed to be 950g so not too bad for a 2.6 tire.
As for the 2.4 x 27.5 this is supposed to be 745 grams
and here is a 765g so a bit over spec.
However the very interesting tire is these XR4 in a 29er version
because that's supposed to be 780 grams which would be really great for an aggressive tread pattern like this.
But overall very close to the stated weight something that is not that common these days.
You can get the tires in 27.5 and 29, you can get the SE4 version which is reinforced sidewalls.
Overall I've always had good experiences setting them up tubeless
the sidewalls are pretty nice and stiff and overall these are good tires for what they are
think about them as being not as aggressive as a Minion, very similar to a Dissector but with less weight
and depending on where you buy it from these can be a bit cheaper as well.
So what do you guys think about the XR4 Team Issue tires from Bontrager?
Which one is your favorite Bontrager tire?
I've used XR4, I've used XR3s and I liked them a lot.
What about you folks? Let me know in the comments below.
If you found this useful don't forget to like, subscribe, comment,
and until next time hope to see you folks on the trails
why not running Bontrager tires!?
Cheers guys, cheers!