WORDS: DANGEROUS, IMAGES: DUNLOP
It’s the brand’s most street-orientated product in their hypersport familia, with a 90% road bias, aimed at sportsbike and naked riders alike. Following in the footsteps of three prior SportSmart products (first introduced in 2010), the new iteration is, unsurprisingly, the best yet, with a claimed 20% gain (rear grip) in wet weather performance, thanks to a new compound (dual at the rear), grip resins and an optimised tread pattern. Dunlop’s also claiming a faster warm-up time and more even wear, owing to the largely different front profile that better relates to the one at the derriere. The biggest gain, however, is perhaps the rear’s 15% hike in durability, which is attributed to all of the above changes, plus tweaks to the rubber’s Rayon carcass. Sounds good, eh, but how does the hype translate to the Tarmac? To get a first-hand grasp, we headed out to Barcelona where the lovely folk at Dunlop had lined up an assortment of tasty two-wheelers, ready for a spanking on the surrounding mountain roads. The idea was to take a two-hour ride to Parcmotor race track, where a horde of box-fresh ZX-6Rs would showcase their track-capable prowess. The plan was implacable, but I must have missed the part in the briefing about throwing a beach towel over your preferred steed before breakfast, meaning it was a wallowing whale of a Tracer that was left to power me to the circuit (… oh, how the others laughed).
I’ll be honest; on a dry, warm day, riding on grippy Spanish roads, there’s not a lot you can tell about a tyre. We were cracking on at a fair old lick, but we never came close to finding the limits of the rubber. That said, Big Betty (my Tracer) was in her element, pitching around with ease and showing off not just the agility of the rubber, but the general stability of it, too. Unlike the track-focused Dunlops, the SportSmart’s lack of a stiff nylon N-TEC carcass meant the tyre felt pleasantly forgiving on road imperfections, absorbing the rough stuff with its Rayon core and proving quite telling through its new single-strand Jointless Belt (JLB). But it wasn’t until we got to the racetrack that the true credentials of the rubber were unleashed.