I plan on riding fire roads and other various dirt roads this coming season. I am looking for something street oriented that is not too aggressive, but competent enough to bite on the dirt.
I was thinking of some supermoto tires like the Conti Force sm or something along those lines.
You might want to consider some of the tires that were used on the heavyweight road-oriented dualsports, like the Buell Ulysses & Ducati Multistrada.
Like the Dunlop D616 (here) or the Pirelli Scorpion Sync (here).
Tires like that should give you good road-oriented performance, and be able to handle the occasional fireroad.
I ran a set of the Pirelli Scorpion Sync tires on my Hawk GT (lighter than the VFR in weight and in power, but upgraded to run VFR rims). I was satisfied with their performance, and they lasted about 7K miles on the Hawk.
I run Distanzias on my KTM and love them, I do 95% on road but recenty started off-roading with some ADV folks, ride very aggressive, never have any issues with grip* on or off the road
There are 2 types of Distanzia, SuMo which is soft compound 17" front and rear and Adventure type , harder compund with higher load rating, which I believe is also available in 17" but mostly in 18", 19" and 21" I run soft SuMo rubber and the donside is that with heavy load the rear only lasts 5000 miles, but so do the Pirelli.
Got my last rear tire from Twisted Throttle for $150 which is about dealer cost (prior set I got at dealer cost through the shop)
* I did crash bunch of times but that was from doing stupid things, not due to the tire
So I have seen a lot of conflicting ideas on putting a 180/55 on a 3rd gen. It is a much more common size and there are basically no tires I am looking at that come in the stock size of 170. With a rim of 5.5" in width it would make sense that a 180 would fit. Can someone straighten that out for me please?
Pirelli Scorpions are great dual purpose tires. I have them on my KLR. They were designed to be OEM equipment on the Ducati Multistrada so they'll do well on the street and off road (gravel). They have pretty good life as well - I've got about 4500 kilometres on them (about half the life) and my KLR is almost always completely loaded down.
[image: View Post]Toddd, on 06 January 2012 - 01:49 PM, said:
So I have seen a lot of conflicting ideas on putting a 180/55 on a 3rd gen. It is a much more common size and there are basically no tires I am looking at that come in the stock size of 170. With a rim of 5.5" in width it would make sense that a 180 would fit. Can someone straighten that out for me please?
VFRD Member V4Rosso is running a 180/55 rear, a PR2 now and had a RoadSmart before, and it seem it works fine.
Metzeler even lists 180/55 size rear for the 3rd gen for some models, just gives a better profile on that 5,5 rim that a 180/55 is designed for. A 170/60 is nowdays designed for a 5,0 rim, was diffrent in the late 80´s, early 90´s.
I also like the Pirelli Scorpions but for this winter & harsh/hard terrain (including some snow) I'm using Pirelli Corsa RS. Pro: they do well on both road & dirt/mild mud, consumption is near the same as regular road tires. Con: are a bit noisier, looks a bit strange, it's a bit risky to leann too much (knee down) on the road & not so sharp turners compared to regular road tires.
All in all I'm happy with them for winter although temperatures here are quite low (average 0 deg Celsius). For summer I'll get the Scorpions.
See how they look here: http://www.vfrdiscus...um/6222-my-vfr/
Edited by ciprinakos, 18 January 2012 - 09:43 AM.
Not sure if anybody else has experienced this, but I put a set of pirelli scorpions on my VFR for the winter months. I experienced a significant amount of wobble on the rear wheel that was a bit unsettling. I'm not saying that everyone would experience this, but I did want to give my input here. I ended up removing them.
I am not sure if the Continental ContiTrailAttack comes in sizes for the VFR, but I have used them and they are surprisingly competent on forest roads. But they are also very nice on the asphalt.