REVIEW: Dugast Rhino cross tubs

REVIEW: Dugast Rhino tubular cyclo-cross tyres, Condor Cycles, £79.99 EACH

Cotton sidewalls: crazy but lovely

I'm already two races into the Elmy Eastern Cross League, plus two crashes and a running incident that left me sprawled face first on Hackney Marsh having sprinted into a rabbit hole.
So it seems quite correct to make an early report on my current set-up, at the heart of which lies a big change from clinchers to tubs.
This big change follows five seasons of racing clinchers -Specialized Houffalize before it was discontinued, then Michelin MudPlugger 2, which is a very robust, excellent mud tyre but not the lightest.
I was talked into tubs because whereas on the road scene the advantages are quite slender, in Cross, so the theory goes, the ability to run a tub at 30 psi without getting an immediate snakebite the minute you hit a stone or ridge, is a huge advantage. This advantage gets better the muddier it gets, which is why I will have to revisit this review later in the season - the first two races have been 50 psi affairs and virtually grass crits. Very fast, very hot, and very pumped up, in all senses.
But it's not too early to say that I really love these tyres. OK, OK, so you can see my whole rig here: this is the culmination of a terrible ownership experience of a succession of not-quite-right cross bikes, where fork judder was always terrible, the braking sub-standard and so on and so on. I went from an adapted Dawes Audax bike to a Condor with terrible brake judder; to an Alan that was stolen; to a Focus Mares that served also as a commuter; and finally to what you see here, a top-of-the-tree Ridley X-Night. Even this has not been trouble free. There are several hex-key bolts that hold the derailleur hanger in place. Beautiful little things, but they wear lose at the first sight of a rough track. This caused funny creaks and ticks in the frame that nobody could locate or understand. Finally, I spent £300 changing the entire chainset and BB to a dedicated BB30 set-up, SRAM Force. The noises continued unabated and only then did the bike shop locate the noise to the hex-key bolts.

This all goes to show that like cars, the tricky problems can be really horribly tricky. And expensive.

So was it crazy to add another whole layer of experiment, ripping my time trialling Ultremos off the Zipps and re-purposing these carbon wheels to the derby demolition scene called 'Cross?

And was it not even crazier to mount tyres with cotton sidewalls so delicate you have to waterproof them yourself with Aqua Seal to stop them rotting in the rain? This, for the single discipline in cycling where you are guaranteed to get wet and muddy?

And they're £80 a pop, which until oil went up, was more than most people paid for car tyres.

And, because I have V-Brakes, I had to buy Swiss Stop yellow pads for V-Brakes, which are quite unusual, had to be special ordered, and cost £39.99 - for four pads no shoes. That's a lot of money.

But the first results are worth it all - so far. They're incredible lithe and light and feelsome, and mounted on Zipp 303s, the front one being the Cross specific build that Zipp did, with 24 spokes instead of 20 (adds almost nothing in weight but some in stiffness and strength), the whole bike is transformed.

I'll add to this blog as the mud rises and the tyre pressures fall.

All sorted: Ridley X-Night 2012 model, with Zipp 303 Cross wheels and Dugast Rhino tubs