Mitas X-Road CX Tyres

We have been rolling around on Mitas mountain bike tyres over the last couple of years. Their Scylla XC tyre has been the choice of many XC racers, we found the fast square blocks providing predicable performance and a low rolling resistance. The Scylla fitted neatly our need for a marathon/XC tyre. When we wanted something with a little more grip for our front tyre with Gravity Enduro in mind, we stepped up to the Mitas’s Kratos. The Kratos is a surprisingly fast rolling tyre but with wide aggressive knobs for plenty of grip, the Kratos have track us through the wildest trails thrown at us.

Mitas Kratos

This brings us to our latest review and not necessarily a change of pace either, the Mitas X-Road. You might think it blasphemy mentioning anything road related, but the X-Road is part of Mitas’s CX range. It comes with similar features of their top mountain bike treads; Tubeless Supra 127tpi casing and CRX race compound rubber.

Our first introduction to Tubeless CX tyres

We have been using CX tyres for a number of years both for CX racing and our on-road riding. CX tyres give us a super light but grippy tyre, one that spins up quickly on just about all surfaces. Given a few extra pumps of air, the CX tyres improved our average speed through lowered our rolling resistance and their light-weight was noticed on the climbs, particularly over our previous choices of commuting/training tyre (PRs in Strava, woohoo!).

Endless dirt roads over summer

With a current trend to include more dirt-based adventure rides, and a physical move to a more a hostile riding environment we were more than excited to wrap the Mitas X-Road around our wheels. Planned rides included plenty of dirt roads and fire-trails, some trail exploring of our new location, bunch rides with the roadies and maybe even a race.

Close-up of the almost familiar tread patten

The X-Road tyre tread reminds us of a fairly traditional XC mountain bike tyre pattern. The center blocks are small and closely spaced, providing a fast tread for road and dirt conditions. As your roll over to the edge the tread opens up and gets slightly more bold, this gives grip for cornering and loose situations no matter dry or wet. The tyres are suitably light too; we weighed them in at 350g, for their 33C casing. With a standard splash of sealant the tyres quickly inflated and held firm. The wheels were then placed on our test rig, a steel framed hard-tail mountain bike.

70kms offroad for Buffalo Gelato 

Out on the road the X-Road sat pretty comfortably between a smooth tread and a light XC tyre, giving off just a slight hum as the closely spaced tread rolled across the bitumen. While the tyres are stamped for pressures up to 85psi, we only nudged them to 60psi due to the mountain bike rims they were shoeing. We found that 60psi gave us the suppleness needed for the rough country roads we were testing on, but still kept us fast enough for a bunch.

The dirt roads and fire-trails is where the X-Road excels, the tread pattern offered plenty of grip and rolled effortlessly over the mixture of terrain. For these multi-hour adventures we dropped the pressure down a tad and found the tyres responded well, we were thinking less about being careful where we were riding and were able to enjoy the ride more. We then set about with some all-out exploration, finding running trails and sheep tracks, with plenty of rocks and cacti. It was a blast to bomb downhill on a narrow trail into the unknown, finding the our limits amongst the loose shale. Exploring our new backyard, lookouts, tracks and scenery. To be fair we did hike-a-bike back out of a few sections, but that was more about the gearing choice than anything else.

Local XC race on the X-Roads, guess who won Elites?

It has been summer and CX racing isn’t in full swing, so instead we took our X-Road tyres to a XC race. The local clubby event was only 45 minutes long and the trails included some rough rock-garden features. Even still, the club called it their “Fast and Furious” loop, smooth is fast yeah? Tyres were set at 40 and 45psi , front and rear respectively. These were tough testing conditions, a dry and dusty trail that mixed hard-pack, sandy dust, loose-over-hard and rocks. When pushed the tyres provided predictable drift especially as it moved to sandy conditions. They were also durable enough to allow for multiple close calls between the rocks and rims, with some “yes-I-did-feel-that” moments. We did have to slow down a little to pick our way more neatly through the rock-garden, but with such light tyres we accelerated out of corners faster and held a higher speed on the straights. In our experience the X-Road would be highly suitable for any Australian CX course.

Toowoomba MTB Club trails

Finally we toured some of the Northern NSW and South East QLD mountain bike trails. Sometimes doing a roadie bunch ride, then rolling straight into some mountain biking after. We did find the limits of the X-Road amongst the rocks and Black Diamond trails, however, aggressive XC trails aren’t what the X-Road are built for. The X-Road are neatly placed as a CX tyre, and rightly so. We did love the super-light tubeless features, we fear not catheads and cactus of our new hostile riding environment. And there’s still a bucket load of tread remaining, attesting to their quality and durability after 4 months of solid summer riding. We are looking forward to more adventures in the coming months on our X-Roads.