Announced last month, the Hutchinson Blackbird Race is claimed to be 'the fastest tyre' the French brand has ever produced.
Alongside claims relating to speed, it’s also said to be exceptionally light, at only 240g for a size 700x28c tyre – undercutting key rivals, such as the Continental GP5000 S TR by 40g, on paper.
The brand claims the Blackbird Race builds on the success of its existing Blackbird TLR tyre – which was highly rated by our tester, Ashley Quinlan – with an updated rubber compound and a lighter casing.
Despite its feathery claimed weight, though, Hutchinson says it isn’t simply a time trial tyre, suitable only for short races on good roads.
Instead, the brand claims Intermarché-Wanty (the WorldTour team it sponsors), will use it for the “vast majority” of its races this season.
At £69.99 / €79.99, it’s £10 / €10 more expensive than the standard Blackbird tyre, but we’ve no doubt many will be willing to cough up the extra cash if Hutchinson’s claims stand up to scrutiny.
But do they? Let’s find out.
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Lightweight but not so wide
On our scales, our set of Blackbird Race tyres weighed 243g each – totalling 486g for a pair.
Given that’s only 1.25 per cent over, and our samples were weighed with elastic bands included, we’ll say that’s within tolerance and give Hutchinson a tick on that count.
Compared to the competition, that’s very light indeed.
A 28c Continental GP5000 S TR weighs 280.6g, for example, while Pirelli’s latest P Zero Race TLR RS is claimed to weigh 295g in the same size.
Vittoria’s Corsa Pro TLR and Schwalbe’s Pro One TLE get closer at 274 and 264g, respectively (both in a size 28c), but it even undercuts Continental’s super-fast GP5000 TT TR time trial tyre, which weighs 252g in a size 28c.
A key question, then, is how this has been achieved.
For Hutchinson’s part, it says it was able to lighten the tyre by cutting the weight of the 'rubberised fabric' used in the casing, and by reducing the 'central cross section of the tyre' (likely meaning the thickness of the tread).
As well as reducing weight, decreasing the thickness of a tyre generally helps make it faster – because there’s less material to deform, and less energy is lost to rolling resistance.
One clue to the puzzle might be found in the tyre’s size, though. Mounted to a 19mm-wide (internal) Hunt Sprint Aero Wide rim, our sample measured only 26.15mm wide at 60psi / 4.1 BAR, or 27.5mm wide at 80psi / 5.5 BAR.
With many of the latest road bike wheelsets now featuring much larger internal rim widths, perhaps Hutchinson has designed it to size up ‘correctly’ on wider rims (which tend to increase the ‘measured width’ of a tyre).
In theory, this would enable the tyre to be made smaller, and therefore lighter, for a given nominal size – although, of course, it means you end up with a narrower tyre on narrower rims.
Mach Tread Ultimate
As is often the case with bicycle tyres, the rubber compound (or compounds, in some cases) used in the tread are a key determinant of performance.
Here, the Blackbird Race gets a new compared dubbed Mach Tread Ultimate – which is claimed to offer a 10 per cent reduction in rolling resistance compared to the Mach Tread 3.0 used on Hutchinson’s original Blackbird and its Caracal Race gravel tyre.
If true, this should make the Blackbird Race a very fast tyre indeed, because both the Blackbird and Caracal Race have already proven to be competitively fast in independent tests by Jarno Bierman of bicyclerollingresistance.com.
The Blackbird, for example, was found to have almost identical rolling resistance to Continental’s GP5000 AS TR, while the Caracal Race is amongst the fastest gravel tyres Bierman has ever tested.
It remains to be seen whether the compound improvements here can enable the Blackbird Race to match the latest generation of race-focused road bike tyres, but a 10 per cent improvement would clearly help close the gap.
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