Sorting Motorcycle Street Tires: What’s Best For Your Ride?

Sorting Motorcycle Street Tires | Side-by-Side Chart

There was a time when choosing motorcycle tires wasn’t that tough. The range of motorcycle tires once available for any given bike went like this:

• Street—strictly designed for pavement riding
• Universal—quasi-knobby tires that purported to work well on both pavement and for light dirt work, but generally didn’t do all that well for each riding style
• Strictly dirt with big, knobby tread

Bias ply, uni-compound, and your choice soft or hard, tube-type, end of story. Over the years, things started to get a little more complicated. Tires evolved and the range of options expanded to include radials, tubeless, multi-compound, you name it.

Now, motorcycle tire manufacturers offer a dizzying array of tire options for nearly every bike and riding application from track day hypersport performance to laid back weekend cruising the back roads, replica tires for classic bikes (with today’s high tech in most cases) and loaded two-up long distance touring.

Options are wonderful. But it’s finding the best choice that can be a little daunting. To help with the fundamentals of tire selection, we’ve provided some background information on motorcycle tires in the past, so if you hadn’t seen these, check them out:

• Top Ten Things to know about Motorcycle Tires
• Motorcycle Tire Safety Standards Explained

That information helps set the stage for shopping for your next set of motorcycle tires, but sorting out the options available for your bike and your kind of riding is still likely to be a challenge.

To help make the process easier, we’ve created a handy matrix to allow a side-by-side, multi-brand, multi-type assessment of options possible in one place.

We have included only DOT (FMVSS 219) approved models; non-approved racing tires are not included. For this go-round, we are limiting the matrix to include street tires covering the range from tires suitable for high performance track day applications to touring and cruiser/conventional and classic bike street tires.

The information is on 10 commonly available brands of tires based on a review of online and retail outlet selections. The information is also gleaned from online vendors and retail information. Classifying tires is a little complicated because not all manufacturers use the same terminology to describe the intended application for their products. So, as is our custom, we made some arbitrary decisions on our own and applied some generally accepted terms to create categories for the purposes of this piece.

Our goal is just to create a handy place to start narrowing things down when you are considering new tires. There are other brands you may wish to consider, of course, and the type of tire that suits your riding best is ultimately determined by your bike’s manufacturer’s specifications and precautions, those of the tire manufacturers, tire sizing limitations, projected tread life, your preferences and other factors—not least of which is pricing.

This information is not to be mistaken for the complete technical information available on the manufacturer’s websites, from experienced motorcycle shops, professional mechanics and so on. To get the whole picture on tire selection, please use those sources, as well. Let us know if this is helpful; if it is, we may well invest the time to keep it updated and even may expand it to include dual-purpose, off-road, scooter tires and others.

Motorcycle Street Tires: Cross-Manufacturer Riding Style Chart

Key:

• F =            front
• ww =       whitewall available
• Rr =          rear
• Rd =         radial

* Always follow the manufacturer’s tire specifications for your motorcycle and the manufacturer’s specifications and application data for the tires you may select. Some manufacturers may classify tire applications differently than what is shown here.