Hutchinson gets all chunky rubber and downhill and stuff.

French tyre company, Hutchinson has always had its roots in racing and came to mountain biking when XC speed was always of the essence. In recent years, though, it has lagged behind a little as riders leave the race course and head out to the hills for a bit of rough love.

Last year Hutchinson started sponsoring Tracey Hannah and the rest of the United DH team and the result has been an explosion in new gravity and trail tyres.

Before they go completely over to the gravity world, though, they want to point out that they happen to sponsor the current Olympic men’s champ and they’ve developed a tyre tread just for him and just for that course. It’ll inevitably end up available for you and I, but in the meantime, check out the treads on the start line this weekend.

How minimal? Expect to see this glued on to a Dugast carcass this weekend. Unofficial word is that Schurter has also has designs on it, having seen the tread at Dugast…

The Cobra is Hutch's XC race tyre for the masses. It's now in 29in too.

Chunky - expect more tyres like this appearing from Hutchinson in future. It has a big DH and AM range planned, even venturing into 650B

The Toro - another chunky trail tyre.

Many chunky tyres on the horizon from Hutchinson.

The DZO tyre (right) is a muddy conditions trail/DH tyre with pyramid knobs that can be trimmed by your race mechanic for those in-between conditions.

Expect to see a lot of these tyres appearing later this year (unless they’ve appeared already) with the majority of the innovation being in the worlds of DH/Trail 26in and 650B and 29er for the XC and trail stuff. Apart from that Absalon. He’ll be running 26in on Sunday.

Chipps Chippendale

Singletrackworld's Editor At Large

With 23 years as Editor of Singletrack World Magazine, Chipps is the longest-running mountain bike magazine editor in the world. He started in the bike trade in 1990 and became a full time mountain bike journalist at the start of 1994. Over the last 30 years as a bike writer and photographer, he has seen mountain bike culture flourish, strengthen and diversify and bike technology go from rigid steel frames to fully suspended carbon fibre (and sometimes back to rigid steel as well.)

Comments (5)

hot_fiathot_fiat August 10, 2012 at 5:12 pm

That Cobra looks suspiciously like a busier Tioga Psycho II.

DezBDezB August 10, 2012 at 10:20 pm

Big fan of Hutch tyres. Cougars are good n fast, but Toros are the perfect all-rounder. Damn pricey though.

ChippsChipps August 11, 2012 at 12:01 am

Ze is made in ze France, which might explain some of the price.

mboymboy August 11, 2012 at 6:21 pm

Cougar, Cobra and Toro are “new” tyres are they? :-/

I had a pair of Toro’s on a new bike I bought back in 2009, and have had a Cougar/Cobra pair for almost 18 months now also…

ChippsChipps August 11, 2012 at 10:16 pm

No, those ones aren’t new (they didn’t have pics of all the new ones), however, the Cobra is new in 29in and there are several new chunky tyres coming through in all the sizes. We’ll bring you a full run down in our Eurobike coverage.

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