The best motorbike trackday tyres without the fuss of slicks? Here are our expert picks!

When you ride on track, whether on a trackday or actually racing, you want the highest performance, grippiest, best motorcycle tyres available fitted to your performance sportsbike.

For pure racing classes, that means tyre warmers, and sometimes trackdays allow slick-shod bikes as well. But for most production racing classes, and nearly all trackdays, that means road-legal, treaded tyres.

But even within that definition, there are plenty of track-orientated, high-performance trackday tyres available, sometimes even in different compounds, and many trade-off little in terms of performance compared to a pure slick – especially for non-professional riders.

Plus the added bonus is that, being road legal, trackday buffs don’t have to van their machines to the circuit, as long as the rest of the bike is legal, there’s the option of riding it there, too.

Whether you ride a supersport bike or a middleweight sportsbike, the tyres you choose can make all the difference to your experience. So which trackday tyres are currently available? How much do they cost? And what do you get for your money? Here’s our current pick of some of the best, reviewed by our expert team.

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What is the best tyre pressure for motorcycle trackday?

Normally you’d look in your bike’s manual for the manufacturer recommended tyre pressures. However, these are only a good guideline for the street, and they assume you’ll have the stock tyres fitted.

As soon as you put a decent set of track-focused tyres on, you need to check the tyre manufacturer’s recommendations, not the bike manufacturer’s. These will vary depending on your rim size, and whether they’re hot or cold when you start.

Of course, what the tyre manufacturer recommends may not work best for you, and a few PSI one way or the other isn’t going to cause any issues, while it’s possible you might be faster. The manufacturer’s recommendation is a good starting point, then you can keep experimenting until you find the perfect sweet spot for you.

How many track days do motorcycle tires last?

It depends how hard you ride, but you can usually expect between two to five days out on the track before they need changing.

Cut through the jargon with MCN’s tyre explainer video:

How MCN tests track tyres

At MCN, our team of expert journalists have decades of experience gained over hundreds of thousands of miles in order to provide you with opinions and evaluations you can trust, alongside news of the most significant developments in motorcycling safety gear. We want you to stay safe, enjoy your riding and hopefully look great while doing so! 

We don’t test our kit to destruction; we use it exactly how you do, in the real world and in all conditions.

That means we can deliver impartial buying advice you can rely on. To make it onto this list, adventure helmets must have been worn for thousands of miles by our team of experienced testers, show no major flaws, and meet modern safety standards as well as offering decent value for money. 

To find out if a track tyre is worth spending your money on, our testers use them in the way you will. That means riding them on road but most importantly on track, subjecting them to heavy cornering and braking forces. We then judge them on criteria such as grip, feel, weight of turn-in, wear and water dispersion.

If you can’t see a review against an item on this page, it’s because we haven’t tested it yet or because it did not score four stars or above. Only budget kit that scored at least four or five stars will appear in our best of buying guides.

When we review a budget product, we award it a score out of five. In the ratings tab of a given product, you may also find more specific scores for the different aspects of a product’s performance to help you make an informed decision. We test against criteria like how comfortable it is, how protective is it, does it look good and if it is good value for it’s price tag. Here’s a guide to what each number score means:

• 1 star – Poor performance in this category or overall. A product with a single star rating has fallen below the expected standard and should be avoided.
• 2 stars – Basic performance in this area or overall. A product with a two-star rating has managed to perform to a barely acceptable level and there is room for improvement.
• 3 stars – An average performance in this area or overall. A product with a three-star rating has achieved a basic level of performance and is deemed adequate.
• 4 stars – A product has performed over and above the accepted averaged in this category or overall. A product with a four-star rating has surpassed expectation and delivered in a particularly impressive way.
• 5 stars – A product has performed at the highest possible level in a particular category or overall. A product with a five-star rating has delivered to the highest possible level, impressing the tester with its performance. We would happily spend our own money on it.

To find out more, head to our dedicated page explaining how we test motorcycle products.

– Just so you know, whilst we may receive a commission or other compensation from the links on this page, we never allow this to influence product selections – read why you should trust us.

- Just so you know, we may receive a commission or other compensation from the links on this website - read why you should trust us.