It’s no big secret now that Team RadioShack will be riding Hutchinson tires, not the Bontragers featured on the Team bike photos from Trek. The short answer as to why is this: Because Lance won all seven Tours de France on them. He also rode them back on Motorola. Word on the street is he’s only had five flats on them during the seven years of Tour victories. Is it any wonder he likes them?
This works out exceptionally well for Hutchinson, because unofficially (as in, we never heard this and neither did you), all the team asked for was tires…no “financial consideration provided by…” deal, just tires. I asked Hutchinson’s PR man, Steve Boehmke how many tires this worked out to be and he said “Hundreds. Not thousands, but definitely hundreds.”
The next obvious question is which models are they riding?
Lance is riding the Fusion 2 Tour de France edition (left), while the rest of the team is riding on Intensive 25c training tires (center), and they just ordered a big shipment of them for their first official training camp in Tenerife early next year. When it comes time to toe the line, they’ll be racing on the Carbon Comp Tubulars (right, 23c).
Seeing that Hutchinson is leading the way in RoadTubeless tires, the next obvious question is will they be racing tubeless?
No. Boehmke says the main reason is because Bontrager doesn’t make a RoadTubeless compatible rim, and the team’s sponsored by Bontrager for wheels. Then we got off on a tangent a bit and he said Steve Hed (as in Hed Wheels) has embraced RoadTubeless and says the technology should be able to make tires that ride and race every bit as good at Tubulars within a few years.
