180 60 vs 180 55

[HughiusMaximus]

Evening all,

The rear tyre of my panigale v2 is cooked and its proving tricky to get a replacement.

It came with 180 60 pirelli rosso corsa 2's as standard and am looking to replace with an equivalent pirelli (I guess the new rosso 4 corsa).

Stocks of tyres appear to be very low at the moment so I'm struggling to find a replacement.

I have a lightly used set of Supercorsa SPs but the rear is a 180 55, is there any meaningful reason why I cant throw the supercorsas on to use them up? Overkill for a road bike but it will see me through this year at least.

I figure the 55 will be slightly faster steering, but will have less edge grip (not that I'll be pushing it hard enough on the road to notice..)
Possible slight change in geometry but in reality I probably wont notice any difference?

[Tribal Chestnut]

Might it not mess with the TC and other electronic wizardry? Or can you alter tyre size in the settings? Or I am talking sh**e?

[mikey_b]

HughiusMaximus said:

Evening all,

The rear tyre of my panigale v2 is cooked and its proving tricky to get a replacement.

It came with 180 60 pirelli rosso corsa 2's as standard and am looking to replace with an equivalent pirelli (I guess the new rosso 4 corsa).

Stocks of tyres appear to be very low at the moment so I'm struggling to find a replacement.

I have a lightly used set of Supercorsa SPs but the rear is a 180 55, is there any meaningful reason why I cant throw the supercorsas on to use them up? Overkill for a road bike but it will see me through this year at least.

I figure the 55 will be slightly faster steering, but will have less edge grip (not that I'll be pushing it hard enough on the road to notice..)
Possible slight change in geometry but in reality I probably wont notice any difference?

Double check in the manual what the acceptable tyre sizes are. I had similar with a Tiger 800, the standard front tyre on the early ones was a slightly odd size that didn't have much choice, but a year or two later they issued a service bulletin (including new printed manuals) to specify a slightly different choice of tyre as also being acceptable. That new size had far better choice, including pure-road tyres like the Michelin PR series. If you're lucky, you may find 180/55 is 'allowed' anyway. The difference was only a few mm in reality.

I'm not sure if makes too much difference in the UK, but in some countries you must only fit tyres exactly as specified in the manual, hence printing new copies.

[anonymous-user]

I routinely fit a slightly higher profile tyre on the back of my Triumph, 190 55, rather than 190 50 and preferred a taller front tyre on my previous bike 120 70 rather than 60. I did once fit a wider rear tyre on that but it didn’t handle at all well so I binned that off.