Hunt 4Season Dura Road Wheelset

Well, the Hunt 4Season Dura Road wheelset is an excellent all-round choice, and no mistake. These wheels are strong, not over-heavy, tubeless-ready and evenly built. As a first upgrade over heavy stock wheels, or as a good quality winter or all-round option, they're right on the money.

I recently reviewed the Hunt Race Season Aero Wide wheelset which I thought was very good. These 4Seasons take some of the good qualities of those wheels – build quality, tubeless-readiness – and swap out low weight and aerodynamics for solidly built and dependable. They're a 17mm internal width as opposed to 19mm, and they have four extra spokes at each end: 24 at the front, 28 at the back.

> Buy these online here

The overall feel of the wheels is, frankly, not dissimilar. Okay they're over 200g heavier than the Aero wheelset, but they feel tightly built, and a quick check with the spoke tension gauge revealed plenty of tension, evenly distributed.

They never feel ponderous, and I set a fair number of Strava PBs on them after I swapped the lighter wheels out. Okay, some of them might have been wind-assisted... I had to go out in the wind, you see, to check how they behave in blustery conditions. Very well is the answer, not surprisingly for a shallow box rim. They're unfazed by even dramatic sidewind gusts.

Braking performance from the 6000 T6 aluminium alloy rim is very good, too, remaining predictable and reasonably quiet even in some pretty horrific conditions. Over a couple of months of riding the lanes I managed to use most of a set of brake pads, but there wasn't any significant wear to the rims, which bodes well for longevity.

Also good for longevity is the steel insert on the alloy freehub, which stops the splines of the cassette biting into the soft metal and damaging it. It doesn't completely eradicate the notches but it keeps them to a minimum, and meant that a quick tap with the mallet was enough to free the sprockets at the end of testing.

During testing I had no issues with the 4-pawl freehub, nor with the sealed EZO bearings. Everything ran smoothly in spite of being subjected to some biblical conditions. The supplied skewers are an external cam, with a nylon insert instead of the brass one you get on the more expensive Hunt wheels, but they did the job without any fuss.

Tubeless is a big thing right now, and Schwalbe's new Pro One tubeless tyre is one of the new breed that's promising to really boost the profile of road tubeless; Schwalbe's S-One 30mm tyre recently got a rave review and the Pro One is excellent too. A full review is coming, but it's worth touching on the tyres here because Hunt can supply these wheels fitted with the Pro Ones for an extra £100; that's £20 less than the rrp of the tyres and saves you the bother of fitting and sealing them. The wheels come with tubeless rim tape and valves if you fancy sorting them yourselves.

So is it worth getting the Pro Ones? Yes, in a word. They're excellent. They take longer than expected to bed in and they're rather skittish to begin with, but once they've done 100km or so they calm down considerably and you're left with a tyre that has excellent road feel and exceptional grip. They're pretty easy to fit, too: we snapped them off to check the sealant level and refitted them with a Bontrager TLR Flash Charger pump with no issues at all.

The benefits of a tubeless tyre, in case you're not au fait with them, are lower rolling resistance and better puncture resistance, as well as improved comfort because you can run them a bit softer. The main downside is faff, which buying them fitted removes from the equation. At least, the first time...

> Fancy going tubeless? Read more here

The wheels themselves retail for £229, and they're worth it. They're great all-rounders, strong enough for winter, and light enough to use all year round. The £329 wheel-and-tyre package would be a good way to ease yourself into the tubeless world if that's the way you want to go. Certainly for winter riding it makes a great deal of sense.

You can pick up very good, similarly priced wheels from major manufacturers at a fair old discount, around £50 cheaper than these Hunts – think Fulcrum Racing 5 or Shimano RS31 – but the 4Season Dura wheelset does very little wrong, and if you're going tubeless it'll be a sound investment.

Verdict

Very good tubeless-ready winter wheelset that's good enough to keep on your bike all year