Anyone remember them?

Back in the day they where THE tyres to have. Well, the Smoke was anyway…

What happened to them? Are they just pump by today’s standards??? I seem to remember the Smoke being an awesome rear tyre but then again it was an awful long time ago!!

There’s a reissue model with modern rubber… Reviews said they were reasonably effective but very slow for the amount of grip. Sounds about right… Still was tempted to get a set and re-shoe my ancient commuter in its proper rubber 🙂

Still have a pretty decent set of Smoke/Dart tyres in storage. Every so often get the urge to try them out but haven’t done so yet (tan sidewalls are so 90s).

TBH would rather Specialized revived the Evil Twins.

slainte ➡ rob

I have a good condition set in my garage you can have for the cost of postage – wire bead and fairly cheapy construction I think though.

They’re still available in the US: Smoke Dart

I never really rated the Smoke much, but when they re-issued them a few years ago I bought some Dart Classic’s and still have them fitted to all 4 of my MTB’s. I find then nice and predictable for every day riding.

I was actually thinking about these last night! I really liked them.

aracer – I’m interested, are yours the original large tread design, or the smaller ‘hardcore’ model?

We had a lot of problems with the Smoke re-issue, the bead tearing away from the sidewalls on many occasions (went through three myself, one within an hour of fitting), and got no warranty support from the importer who insisted it must be due to poor brake set-up despite me running disc brakes.

I got some Kevlar bead ones from the states really cheap a few years back. My all time fave tyre. Grippy,light and fast. 29er version please.

Got a pair the summer before last from Jenson. Very good actually, especially the dart (still on my HT), the smoke didn’t last long (2 months or so) as the carcass was very thin indeed 🙁

Smoke-lites were the weapons of choice at the Malverns in ’94 😉

Me & my mates used to swear by them as they were simply great all round tyres & nothing could really touch them for the money back then. Even now we still compare the newer products to Smoke & Darts as it’s pretty hard to find a tyre that’s pretty good at everything. Tough, large volume (1.95″ was big back then), good on rocks, didn’t clog too badly in mud…

Ahh, those were the days when biking was simple. None of this dry tyre, mud tyre, hard or soft compound malarky… 😉

ha ha.. I raced DH on soft compound 2.2 Darts around 18yrs back (they were pretty much the biggest half decent tyres we could find before DH specific tyres came along). and in winter it was panaracer spikes with an old tyre inside to beef the sidewalls up.

slightly ironic that many folk now mince around groomed trail centres on supertacky DH tyres.

Had a set for a couple of years back in the day, pretty much wore them down to nothing in the end. They were easily the best of the bunch back then, but I think by modern standards they’ve been left well behind.

Certainly I remember being able to make my V-Brake (very first Shimano XT ones in 1996) equipped bike make the front Dart break away under heavy braking in a straight line. You wouldn’t get that with decent rubber these days, you’d just do a massive stoppie! That and I remember whilst the Smoke was pretty grippy, it wasn’t the quickest tyre by some stretch.

Oh, and they were fairly puncture prone.

eh? don’t kid yourself.
Trust me, a 2.7 3C minion will break away in a straight line (rather than stoppie) with a v-brake too just from rearward rider weight bias.

it has to be the 2.2 Dart with the 2.1 Smoke. I couldn’t find them anywhere and contacted Panaracer who said they no longer had the mould for the Dart and didn’t think there was enough demand for the Smoke.

Real shame as it was an utterly brilliant combination.

I used to like wtb Velociraptors too. They were similar to Smokes and Darts and you can still get them I think.