Michelin Anakee Road: the ultimate road touring tyre for your adventure bike?

Your new GS or Africa Twin may ooze rugged charm clad in a set of knobby tyres but, for those of us who enjoy adventures of the paved variety, that blocky tread is going to wear out faster and prove noisier for the type of continental road touring many of us enjoy doing. It may also leave you with a reduced level of grip as you lean over into those twisty alpine switchbacks.

A far better option is to opt for a road-focused touring tyre. But, if you do, there are certain non-negotiables we won’t compromise on, and we don’t recommend you do either.

So, what should you be looking for in a set of new road-touring tyres? Well, they need to be durable enough to handle long-distance motorway miles, two-up, and fully loaded without wearing out after each trip. But they should also be grippy enough to stick to the tarmac like a toffee in your grandpa’s pocket when the roads get interesting.

Oh, and any tyre should also have outstanding wet weather performance and, ideally, be tubeless so you can easily plug a puncture by the side of the road.

Michelin Anakee Road

Tread pattern on the Anakee Road puts plenty of rubber on the road, just what a big adventure bike needs

It’s a demanding list, but Michelin reckons it has met all those criteria and more with its Anakee Road, a tyre designed for adventure bikers looking to cross continents on the tarmac, and who may also go off-piste down a gravel road on occasion to get to a campsite.

So, we’ve taken a close look at the construction and design of the Anakee Road to find out if it could be the ultimate road-focused touring tyre for your adventure bike.

The tyre was designed with a 90% road/10% off-road bias so, while it gives you a little in reserve should you find yourself venturing onto a light trail, its main focus is to provide you with a safe, comfortable, fun, and trouble-free adventure biking experience on the road.

How has Michelin geared that 90% towards an adventure bike’s unique characteristics and needs? Firstly, the load that a heavy adventure bike like an R 1300 GS or Africa Twin puts on a tyre can overwhelm it if it isn’t sturdy enough. However, if you make a tyre too tough, you risk losing grip and creating a rigid and uncomfortable ride.

Dual compound

The hard underlying layer of rubber (in blue) is thinner under the soft (yellow) layer on the shoulder to balance grip and durability.

To combat this issue, Michelin has used a dual compound approach it calls 2CT. This means there is a harder wearing compound of rubber running around the centre of the tyre which is designed to deal with all those motorways miles with minimal wear. But then, Michelin has added a softer compound of rubber on the shoulder of the tyre to provide plenty of grip when you lean your bike over into turns.

Even smarter, that softer rubber on the shoulder of the tyre also has a tougher compound of rubber running beneath it to provide greater stiffness for cornering stability, especially under acceleration. Clever stuff.

Aramid keeps it all together

The Anakee Road’s casing shares an ingredient with military-grade body armour and your riding jeans. 

Dual-compound tyres are ideal, then, for adventure biking, but what else about the Anakee Road makes it strong and tough enough to get you, your kit, and possibly a pillion safely across a continent and back? Well, its casing is built with a synthetic fibre called aramid which is known for its high-strength, heat-resistant qualities.

You might have come across aramids in your abrasion-resistant riding jeans, and they’re often used to reinforce military body armour. They also happen to be an ideal material for the demands of an adventure bike touring tyre.

What makes a sticky tyre, sticky?

Hot or cold, dry or wet, Michelin says the Anakee Road is built to take it all

We also need plenty of grip from our tyres, especially as many of us ride year-round in all weather, so our bikes’ tyres have to handle everything from scorching summer heat to frigid cold, rain, and even icy roads in winter.

The tread pattern and profile of the Anakee Road provides a large contact patch with the tarmac, but still has plenty of channels to disperse water. This combination is ideal for a big adventure bike that has to stick like glue when it’s loaded up through those curvy mountain roads, but will also encounter its fair share of wet surfaces.

Another way Michelin’s Anakee Road provides this grip is through the use of Silica, a natural element found in things like quartz, which has been proven to increase a tyre’s durability while at the same time making it grippy and more adaptive to temperature changes.

As you can imagine, there’s a lot of science behind what goes into making a tyre, but in short, Silica helps make the tyre tread molecules stick to each other. It literally puts the ‘sticky’ in sticky tyres.

Many sizes to fit all

If you’ve got an adventure bike, chances are there’s an Anakee Road tyre for it

It can be frustrating finding the tyre you want, only to discover it doesn’t fit your bike’s wheels. Fortunately, Michelin’s Anakee Road tyre is offered in a wide range of sizes to cover all the modern adventure bikes. Fronts are made for 19″-21″ rims, and rears range from 17″-18″ (tubed or tubeless, depending on the machine and rims).

So to answer our original question, could the Michelin Anakee Road be the ultimate adventure bike touring tyre? Well, given Michelin’s focus on building a tyre that meets the specific demands of adventure biking, as well our confidence gained in prior experience with the brand, we’d say the potential is definitely there.

Hopefully we can put a set of them on one of our long-term test bikes soon to find out for sure. You can find out more about the Anakee Road, the Michelin product range and dealer locator HERE.