Earlier this week I took a look at my facebook notifications and the latest posts in the Kawasaki Versys 1000 forums and saw a post that is all to familiar, “What tyre should I go with X or Y”. I would say about once every two weeks someone is posting asking about tyres, this gave me an idea that maybe it would be worth doing a simple survey and getting a look at what the people are running, paying and how long they are lasting.
I am still likely to get a few more responses but I think I have the majority of people who will respond, I hope I have enough responses to draw some conclusions…
What Questions did I ask?
- What generation of Versys 1000 do you have?
- What tyres are you running on your Versys 1000?
- How many miles do you get out of a front tyre?
- How many miles do you get out of a rear tyre?
- How would you rate the dry grip of your tyres?
- How would you rate the wet grip of your tyres?
- How much did your set (Front and Back) of tyres cost you fitted?
For all these questions I gave set response’s to make things easier, for tyres I listed the most common ones from the facebook group and added an other box. For mile I broke it up into 1500 mile steps up to 12000 and the rating was between 1 extremely slippery – 5 extremely grippy. Finally for price I put £100 bands and offered an ‘other’ choice…
What did you learn / find?
Well the first thing I found was that people are lazy and don’t read, nor are they naturally constructive. One of the first comments I received on my post where I shared the survey being “Crap survey it doesn’t list my tyres” when my post had included an invitation to add tyres I had missed… but my favourite responses are the ones where people have used the ‘other’ option on price to enter values in different currencies because they couldn’t be bothered to convert. I suppose I should have expected this as people will always find a way to make things harder than needed.
However after these we find some interesting pieces of information…
1 | What generation of versys is most common?
I was surprised to see that the second is the most common I was expecting it to be a fair chunk but not 55.9%, I was also intrigued by the relationship between 2019 SE and Standard models. It would maybe be interested to survey the 2019 owners again and see how many SE owners have had suspension issues or use all of the additional electronics and how regularly, as when buying my Standard 2019 bike i figured I didn’t need the features and the electronic suspension was just another thing to wrong… but that is a subject for another time.
2 | What tyre is model is most popular?
Before I posted the survey to the Versys Club page the Michelin Road Pilot 5 was around 30% and Metzeler Roadtec 01 around 25% changing to this after… These are often the tyres that I had mentally noted got recommended and I was expecting some outliers but I wasn’t expecting either the number / variety nor was I expecting the Bridgestone T31 to be so popular. This leads me to wonder if the distribution varies versus the gen e.g. people with older gen’s had stuck with older model tyres because they knew them and were happy?
It seems that there are no Gen 2 riders with Road Pilot 4 GT’s and only one with the standard 4’s, where as there are a lot with the 5 and 5 GT. Gen 1 riders seem to be pretty inconclusive and Gen 3’s it looks like most that have replied are still on stock T31’s or Road Angle GT2’s.
3 | What mileage do people get out of their tyres?
Note that I gave the option for ticking if you have not yet gone through a full tyre, for these chart’s those and blank responses were filtered out.
4 | How grippy do people think their tyres are?
Scale of 1 to 5, 1 being extremely slippery, 5 being extremely grippy.
Although this shows us that no one has rated any of these tyres as a 1 for either dry or wet and that the majority of people rate their tyres as extremely grippy in the dry and just below this in the wet it doesn’t show much more. If we look at these rating versus the tyres:
There are some interesting data points, if we for instance compare the Metzeler Roadtec 01, Roadtec 01 HWM and Roadtec 01 SE then the variance may indicate that we do not have enough respondents to draw a solid conclusion.
Note I have ridden with both the Roadtec 01 HWM and 01 SE on the rear of my bike and would rate the dry and wet grip as 5 whilst the bike still has the HWM front tyre on. Which is suprising considering I was riding in Wales in December in the wet at temperature below freezing at times. This unfortunately leads me to judge that for the most part given how close all the tyres are that this data is not particularly significant and that for this to likely work we would need all riders to have a baseline from which to rate.
5. | How much are a set of tyres costing?
This table shows that for majority of people a set of tyres is costing between £200 & £300, I would like to know how someone is getting a set of T31’s for less than £100 and where I can get that deal… Interestingly if we look at the most popular tyre the Michelin Road Pilot 5 / 5 GT (combining them as derivatives in this case) then the majority of people are paying £200 – £400 a set, raising the question of from a mileage and grip point of view given some of what we have seen above are they worth that pice tag?
Summary
If we look at our 5 most popular tyres and there front and back mileage and cost it is difficult to draw a clear consensus, part of this is down to the way I structure getting the data. Maybe I should have asked for values and had asked people to put in costs / mileages as numbers.
However the data for the top 5 ignoring their variants such as the GT and HWM, there are a couple of thing I think we can summarise but very much from a visual / personal judgement of the data.
- All of these tyres seem to inspire relatively good confidence in the wet, with the Micheline Road Pilot 5 and Metzeler Roadtec 01’s being the top scorers with no one putting them less than a 4 in both wet and dry conditions.
- Front and Rear seem to get around the same mileage, this is surprising as from my experiences and those of my direct biking friends front tyres seem to last longer than rears.
- Could this be because people are always changing them at the same time?
- Could they be changing them at the same time because they are switching models?
- Mileage wise looking at the above more as a heat map given the variance in responses, it seems like all of these tyres should do at least 6000 miles,
- T30’s it seems you should expect between 6500 to 7500
- T31’s it seems you should expect around 10500
- Roadtec 01’s it seems you should expect around 5000-7500
- Road Pilot 5 it seems you should expect between 7500-9000
- Road Angel GT2 it seems you should expect around 6000
- Price versus performance it seems £200-£300 is the sweet spot, it seems a fair number of people are paying for that confidence in grip with both the Metzeler and Michelin having customers paying between £300-£400.
- Note one thing I have notice is that both the Metzeler and Michelin have dropped in price, I was quote around £330 about a year ago for either where as now I can find them both for around £260.
- Bang for buck the T31’s win with them being cheaper and getting higher mileage however you are sacrificing confidence in all weathers and that is where the Michelin’s seem to be the next best offering. It would also help to have some more data points here.
A couple of things to consider, this data set is limited and skewed towards 2nd Gen riders, there is also a skew in the number of Michelin Road Pilot 5 riders that could be pulling the data off to one side.
It’s been interesting to take a look at the data and I will leave the survey open, maybe running another more detailed one in future.
Personally it has changed my outlook a little, the original Bridgestone tyres for me supplied on the bike did about 7300 miles both front and rear, I then changed to the HWM Roadtec 01’s and they were a significant improvement in terms of confidence in the bike in all conditions.
I then got about 6500 miles out of the rear before changing, I could have probably squeezed 7000 miles but although they still felt great I didn’t want to risk it after getting caught short on the original Bridgestone’s… I found the threads… Right now the front is getting low at ~ 10,000 miles and I will change that out for another Metzeler Roadtec 01 especially now the price is dropping.
However I ride in all weathers, am 6ft 2″ 24 stone, often ride with pillions or a load on and at a high pace down poor quality roads. So for me I don’t want to change the tyre and risk finding myself in a bush or ditch for lack of the confidence / grip the Metzeler have. That said I will be interested to see what the reviews on the new Bridgestone T32 are like.
If I were to switch away from the Roadtec 01’s it would be to the Michelin Road Pilot 5 GT’s or if I continue to do high mileage and they have good reviews I might try theT32’s. There is a part of me that would love to have some form of taster day for tyres to justify if the change in grip/profile is something I am happy with and could ride with to increase the mileage as I would love to get 10,000 out of both front and rear…
LazyModernTraveler 