Tire selection has become a bit of an obsession ever since I started racing. What's the right one? How much pressure should I run? Tubes or no tubes? All of these questions are very important and can really either make or break you in a race if your are not careful. What I have finally (I think) figured is what I consider my best tire combination.
For the past two weeks or so I have been running different MAXXIS tires than what I was last season. The Ignitor 2.1 on the front and a Larsen TT 1.9 on the rear. The front tire hooks up extremely well in the corners and the rear tire does the same when accelerating. The advantages of such a small tire in the back are the following; it doesn't wander over loose sand like a wider tire, it is lighter thus making my acceleration even faster, and it digs in on corners. The only thing I might change is to run a 1.95 Larsen TT instead to allow for some extra squish. Even though I have 3 inches of travel in the rear it seems to rebound fast off of small jumps and bumps. This could also be due to running a higher tire pressure than I normally do but I would like to avoid pinch flats (and no its not my rear shock) . I used to run tire pressure as low as 30psi until I got my first pinch flat during a race last year. Since then I have slowly increased the pressure and there really isn't a noticeable difference between 30 to 40 but anything above that seems to be a lot faster and it still hooks up the same. I am actually running 45psi in the front and 50 in the rear. Being that I only weigh 165 its not necessary for me to worry about pinches (fingers crossed) with that psi.
The reason I am still stuck in the past and running tubes; If you flat in a race and you have tubeless tires they are really difficult to pop the bead in order to put a tube in, and fix-it-flat doesn't work on gashes. Other than that... I am ready to ride tomorrow!!!
