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TECH NEWS
continental gp 5000 tyres5First ride: Continental GP 5000 clincher tyre - 500km first impressions
Following the launch last week of the new Continental GP 5000 tyres on the sunny island of Tenerife, I’ve been riding the new tyres (25mm clinchers) on my local roads around the Cotswolds plus a cheeky long weekend in Nice, logging up about 500km in the dry and rain on a variety of road surfaces. So I feel it’s a good time to deliver some first ride impressions.
- Continental Grand Prix 5000 tyre with tubeless option launched + Video
There are compromises involved in choosing a tyre. You want the lowest rolling resistance, maximum grip, superb puncture resistance and cast iron durability. Low weight and a good price are good too.
Continental’s GP 4000 has earned a solid reputation for being a tyre that provides a good balance of these attributes which has led to it being a very popular tyre in its 14-year lifespan. It’s a tyre that works well for racers on sun-drenched roads to sportive cyclists on rain-sodden rough roads, and everything else between those extremes.
There’s a lot riding on Continental’s brand new GP 5000 then. At first, it doesn’t look like much has changed, other than the number, but look closer and read some of the tech details from the launch event and you realise every component of the tyre has been refined, fettled and improved to extract more from each of the critical performance departments mentioned earlier.
The first brief ride up and over Tiede in Tenerife didn’t provide much feedback other than why can’t UK roads be as glass smooth as they have on the small island? Back home and on familiar roads provided a much more useful assessment. I’ve recently been riding a Canyon equipped with 25mm GP 4000s so I had some recent experience on them, and it's a tyre I’ve ridden and raced a lot over the years.
With a pair of 25mm clincher GP 5000s in my hand luggage (the tubeless tyres weren’t available) I got them fitted to my current test bike, a Specialized Venge. Notes on the fitting process; they went on extremely easily with no tyre levers needed to slide the bead into the rim well of the Roval CLX 64 wheels. I set the pressure to 80 psi front and 85 psi rear and hit the road.
First impressions are, they feel like tyres! They are nice and quick on my local test loops, comprising a mix of road surfaces, short and long hills and some tasty descents. The tyres clearly deliver that feeling of speed and low rolling resistance you want and expect of a high-end tyre.
They feel agile too in the corners and on the rougher roads, they have a nice damping quality to them, providing a smooth and stable ride over the coarsest surfaces. On damp roads and in the rain, and roads with a mixture of dry and wet patches, the GP 5000s feel locked into the road with grip to spare.
To test cornering grip, the mountainous roads around Nice provided the ideal environment to really give the new rubber a stern test. And the grip levels of the new tyres turned out to be very impressive. I found excellent cornering grip at speed and within a few turns I was carrying more and more speed into corners I had never ridden before. Even through some tighter-than-expected bends, I could really lean on the front tyre confident that it would not slip out.
Continental makes some impressive claims for its new tyre, small though they might be, and some lab testing would be needed to independently verify those improvements. Out on the road and having logged up several hundred kilometres though, it’s clear the new GP5000s are every bit as good as the outgoing versions, but whether they are as markedly better than the older tyres is really hard to assess based purely on riding.
The outgoing GP 4000 is considered one of the best high-end performance tyres on the market so the benchmark is very high, but it’s clear the new GP 5000 is every bit as good and, if the Continental claims are to be believed, marginally better. It’s very difficult to give accurate feedback about how the new tyre compares to the previous one, but I can safely say they haven’t messed it up.
As of yet, I’ve not punctured. Inspecting the tyres closely reveals no cuts or holes. I'll be watching this aspect of the tyres performance very closely. Many people also mentioned the susceptibility of sidewall tears of the previous GP 4000s so that's something I'll be looking out for as well.
I’m also super keen, as a tubeless tyre fan, to try the tubeless GP 5000s so I’ll try and get some of those on test because if Continental’s figures are to be believed, they are even better.
For now, hopefully, that provides a bit of useful info on Conti’s latest tyres. Stay tuned for more.
The Continental GP 5000 at a glance
- 14 years since the GP4000 was first introduced
- GP 5000 available in clincher and tubeless up to 32mm wide
- 12% better rolling resistance
- 20% increased puncture resistance
- Improved grip and comfort and 10g lighter
- LazerGrip lazer engraved textured shoulders to enhance cornering grip
- Active Comfort Technology is a layer of elastomer dampening material inside the tyre designed to dampen vibrations
- GP 5000 Tubeless is 5% lower rolling resistance and 5% improved puncture resistance over its clincher sibling
- GP5000 clincher and tubeless tyres will cost €61 and €75 respectively
David worked on the road.cc tech team from 2012-2020. Previously he was editor of Bikemagic.com and before that staff writer at RCUK. He's a seasoned cyclist of all disciplines, from road to mountain biking, touring to cyclo-cross, he only wishes he had time to ride them all. He's mildly competitive, though he'll never admit it, and is a frequent road racer but is too lazy to do really well. He currently resides in the Cotswolds, and you can now find him over on his own YouTube channel David Arthur - Just Ride Bikes.
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21 comments
You really need to understand that, even with the same manufacturer, that the nominal tyre width printed on the casing is usually entirely that - a crappy situation to be sure, like sizing in almost everything else. Continental have been particularly guilty in this regard with some of their tyres. Given your experience I find it hard to believe you don't know that - although of course it's a useful catalyst for a whinge.
Have completed about 70 miles on new GP5000 clincher.
25mm only come upto 26mm on 19mm internal rims, which is much less than the equivalent GP4000s.
Intitial riding was positive but have now got two cuts in tyre, one over 8mm long, I am not sure if it is a cut or a tyre failure, very disappointing for an expensive new tyre.
The 4000RS comes up as 27mm on a 17C rim! And according to the continental data is still a faster tyre than the 5000 anyhow https://www.bicyclerollingresistance.com/road-bike-reviews/continental-g...
Going tubeless has compromised the 5000 IMHO, but then given the way road riders are hopping on the fad they've clearly thought they need to go down that route, and now their top end tyre is coming up short.
Aerocoach have tested the 5000 alongside the 4000 and the Grand Prix TT:
https://www.aero-coach.co.uk/gp-5000-data
The numbers suggest that it's a small incremental improvement over the 4000 rather than a quantum leap.
I think that the ability to run them tubeless will be the big gain over its predecessor.
Do the roads in Norway have the same traffic volumes? Do they have HGVs and farm traffic chewing up the verges the way they do here? And do their council contractors have the same slapdash attitude to pothole and other surface repairs? I doubt it.
Edit: shortly after posting the above I can see there's now an article about the Aerocoach test.
The UK has roughly 61million more inhabitants, but approx 140,00 sq km less area. So probably less traffic. Besides, Mesta, the biggest roads repair and maintenance contractor is majority owned by the state.
Land area is probably not a terribly useful metric.
Population of Norway is 5.3 million. There are 2.7 million cars, 470,000 vans and 74,000 HGVs. [source] A total of 28 billion miles were travelled, 78% of it by private cars. [source]
The UK (population 66 million) has over 247,000 miles of roads. Of the 37.9 million vehicles licensed for use the road 83% (31.3 million) are cars. 327 billion miles were driven in 2017.
The 515,000 HGVs licensed in the UK make up 5% of the traffic and cover 17 billion vehicle miles. These heavy vehicles (max. weight increased to 44 tonnes in 2009) cause far greater damage to the roads and other infrastructure than cars & vans:
https://bettertransport.org.uk/blog/better-transport/lorries-cause-more-...
Further stats in the RAC's mobility FAQ.
Well, yeah. But they still aren’t as sexy as Corsas are they?
If I wanted something ordinary and practical I’d buy a German car
I've just specced 28mm GP5000 tubeless on my new Handsling A1R0evo, so I hope they're at least as good as the Schwalbe One's that I would have received as standard!
Any idea if there will be a tubular version?
The reason the roads are smoother in Tenerife compared with Britain is probably because most potholes and road wear is either caused or exacerbated by the expansion of water when it freezes.
The reason UK roads are not glass-smooth is mostly because the "maintenance" is done by adding layer upon layer of topdressing with very coarse stones (other countries use finer grade stones). The periods between re-making the roads are very long, to save cost, and the roads are top-dressed with tar and coarse stones to seal cracks and provide a supposedly grippier surface for cars than if finer stones are used (I doubt this is significant).
In many cases, the roads have been dug up, patched, and then dug up some more again, and the subsurfaces are collapsing. So many roads need complete remaking- the backlog is incredible.
The UK has the lowest infrastructure spending on roads in the EU, and a relatively high proportion of that is for investment rather than operation and maintenance. So roads are not swept, or mended or replaced. It's a national scandal.
It's the financial climate, not the meteorological one...
Ideological, not financial.
£9bn per year since 2010 in deferred fuel duty, because 'war on motorist'.
£3bn+ (so far) for a railway with no track or trains yet and which nobody can see the point of.
£50bn (so far) on botching Brexit.
£1.5bn on a political bribe which is falling at the first hurdle.
£30bn for Crossrail 2 but plug pulled on a tenth of that for electrification across the 'Northern Powerhouse'.
The money's there when they want to spend it. When they don't, that's 'austerity'.
The reason roads are poor in the UK is because of chronic under investment and cheap, short term ‘surface treatment’ patch repairs. Go to Norway, look at the roads, their weather is just as bad.
Exactly, same here in Quebec. Complete neglect and substandard construction and repairs and materials for 30 years means our entire road system is a shambles, very dangerous for cycling, and yet right over the border in Vermont and Ontario the roads are smooth and properly maintained even though their weather is just as bad.
Tenerife does have some fairly rough roads, though for most part the ones leading up to MT Teide are silky smooth, though some parts made me glad I was on the gravel bike! Ironically the smoothest bits are also the sections that would see freeze/thaw but are used heavily by the tourist buses and what not, ie as with others it’s money not climate.
IMHO I think that's rubbish, I blame this useless Tory Government, it's crystal clear they have no intention of spending on our "now" 3rd world road system, Oh and by the way we have had about 3 frosts this winter, are you in reality Boris the troll-idiot Johnson......
Yes, how do they measure up? My 25mm GP4000S-II on 20mm internal width rims measure at least 28mm, and my 28mm tyres on 21mm internal width rims are 32mm. It would be nice to know if the new tires or similar or if they've been resized? Thanks!
Ive just fitted 25mm Schwalbe Pro Ones on my new wheels. They have 20mm internal width and it makes the tyres measure 28mm @ 100psi, which I like
What is the real weight of this new 700x25 Gp5000 tyre?
Is it really 10g lighter than Gp 4000 sII ?
How do they size up on your rims, would you mind getting the calipers out?
The GP4000 often sized up quite large, for example a 25mm tyre on a 18-19mm wide rim could often end up nearly 28mm wide which could lead to issues with bikes with tight frame and brake caliper clearences.