The Rubber Queen is a mountain bike tyre that we think you’ll fall in love with. It takes the classic ‘must do’ rules of a great all-round tyre and follows them to the letter.
It’s got one of the biggest air chambers of any 2.2in tyre we’ve encountered, which gives a high degree of float and in-built suspension feel – always good.
It sports a widely spaced set of full-depth treads which seem to juggle their self-cleaning abilities with being good on hard rocky surfaces and dirt of almost all varieties.
Add a lightweight casing – our folding model weighs only 650g – and you can see why it feels so flighty. These traits make it equally suitable for use on a hardtail as it is on a long-travel all-mountain rig.
We found the tyre rolled extremely well without the drag you’d expect from a ‘big’ 2.2in version, although we did find that on narrower rims the tyre felt a bit unstable run at lower pressures, and forced over in hard turns.
However, you can’t have it all, and what you do get with the 2.2in Rubber Queen is well worth having. For sidewall options and the Black Chili compound you’ll need to look at the wider, heavier and more expensive – and less cross-country useful – 2.4in version.