How do you know your tyres are warmed up?

With your contact on terra firma reliant on two hand-sized patches of rubber it’s hard to know when your bedded-in tyres are up to operating temperature, but there are a couple of factors that will enable you to know without stopping at the side of the road and feeling them with your hand.

The first is the weather and time of day. You may have heard commentators going on about track temperature at MotoGP, and the fact is that dark tarmac absorbs the sun’s heat very well, so on a sunny afternoon it can be 30-40 degrees C and will transfer that heat into your tyres in a few minutes.

Conversely, a cold winter morning is not going to help you, so the tyres will have to generate their heat themselves and it’s going to take a few miles of quite fast work to generate that heat.

The type of riding you are doing makes a difference. If you are creeping through traffic on wet roads, the tyres will struggle to get warm.

But if you’re on an open road with plenty of curves that allow you to lean left and right and some progressive braking from those relatively high speeds, that’s going to help too.

So, when you come up to that tasty bend, think about what sort of riding you’ve been doing before you tip it in hard. 

• Get a friend into biking and win £10000 for you, and £5000 for them with the MCN 1000