Vittoria Terreno Zero TLR G2.0 tyre 700x38

The Vittoria Terreno Zero TLR G2.0 is a slick gravel tyre that's designed for road and smooth off-road duties but is capable of much more.

On the surface, the Terreno Zero is a large volume road or slick gravel tyre that is best suited to tarmac and finely graded off-road paths. But don't let appearances fool you, as it's more capable than that if you're willing to give it a go.

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The Terreno Zero is the slickest tyre in Vittoria's gravel range, with the Terreno Dry, Terreno Mix and Terreno Wet models offering increased tread patterns for more off-road and muddy conditions. All of them use a graphene compound in their rubber, something only Vittoria uses in its tyres, claiming that this revolutionary material allows for natural material barriers of rubber to be removed so there is no compromise between speed, grip, durability and puncture resistance.

The Terreno Zero also features a 120TPI construction with a reinforced casing; Vittoria admits that might add weight to the tyre but claims it improves strength, resistance and puncture protection. Real world experience would suggest all of this to be true.

The 700x38 size is the only one in the Terreno Zero tubeless range that's available in both this TLR – Tubeless Ready – and TNT versions. All the other sizes – 700x32, 700x35 and 650x47 (which Stu reviewed last year) – are TNT only. TNT is Vittoriaspeak for Tube/No-Tube and features a nylon 120 TPI casing construction that improves strength, resistance and puncture protection and also adds a bit of weight. Experience with the TLR suggests this might not be strictly necessary, and the TLR is the one with the tan sidewall, which could be more important to you.

While you can put a tube in the Terreno Zero TLR, gravel tyres really do prefer to be set up tubeless if you want to get the best out of them for comfort, grip and puncture resilience.

Fitted without a tube, the tyres pumped up and sealed easily enough with no frantic thwapping, explosions or sticky mess, which is always a relief no matter how tubeless ready a manufacturer says a tyre is. They inflate true to size on the Kinesis CX Disc wheels they've been mounted on.

The tread pattern, such as it is, is inspired by Vittoria's top-of-the-range Corsa road tyre, with a wide grooved slick central tread and slightly angled hexagonal knobs on the sides. That side pattern is meant to minimise resistance in the rolling direction, yet provide dependable bite when loaded in the corners and under braking, but it appears to be more of a homage to the pattern formed by graphene atoms than anything else. The tyres are marked as directional which, given the paucity of tread, could be seen as optimistic.

On a road environment they're not the fastest tread-free gravel tyres around; not that they're necessarily slow, but they rumble along rather than skip lively compared with other slick gravel tyres, the thickness of the rubber of the centre tread the possible culprit here.

The plus side to this is that they're incredibly robust, so happily take crappy tarmac and potholes in their stride, romp over packed gravel paths and perform far better than you might expect on other rougher surfaces. I've been running them all winter over all kinds of terrain, from smooth blacktop, across gravel of all grades, along rocky off-road to really-shouldn't-be-here thick mud, and they're deceptively capable over all of these surfaces and are also showing very little signs of wear.

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During the test period they've suffered only one puncture and that was a small flint slash, something that's not uncommon around these parts. It refused to seal, was tubed to get home, and with an internal patch glued in, that tyre's been rolling fine since then. That's it. Given the abuse they've been put under they should have fared far worse for a slick road based tyre and been nicked and ripped to pieces.

I found tyre pressure to be quite crucial, with the sweet spot between feeling too firm and bottoming out on square edges quite defined. Although that might be down to the inappropriately pointy and rooty paths I took these tyres down, and if you're just running them on more level ground then this is much less of an issue.

Don't be put off by the lack of tread – I've been diverting well away from tarmac and taking these off road over terrain that would be more suited to a mountain bike and under all sorts of conditions, and the tyres have been stunningly ok considering their baldness. I do, though, have a history of mountain biking, cyclo-cross and taking skinny tyred bikes down unsuitable paths, sometimes deliberately, obsessing over tyre choice and then having to deal with tyre choices inappropriate to the surface, so I'm used to a bike bouncing and squirming about beneath me... your willingness to test these tyres' suitability off road may vary, but they're more versatile than their road and packed gravel designation would suggest.

They're even not impossible in thick mud as they can carve quite nicely through it, and there's the logic-bending theory that a tyre that doesn't have any tread doesn't have any tread that can clog with mud, which works, to an extent.

Given that they've been ridden for several months over and through some testing conditions that included brand new tarmac, floods, broken roads, rooty singletrack more suited to mountain bikes, snow, mud, wide rutted tracks, slurry and even some actual gravel, with their sturdy character they're standing up to the ill treatment amazingly well and far beyond expectations, which makes their price, which is in the ballpark for this sort of thing, a bit of a bargain.

Compared to the similarly tread-averse Maxxis Receptor, it's a heavier tyre but looks to be more adaptable and robust off-road (and the Maxxis is £50 at rrp); it squares up nicely against the £55 WTB Byway too, and could give the gravel favourite Panaracer GravelKing Semi Slick Plus TLC a good run for its money too, which is £49.99 at rrp.

Conclusion

The Vittoria Terreno Zero gravel tyre is genuinely surprising in how much it's capable of. It gobbles up tarmac and fine gravel, and if that's all you use your gravel bike for then its robust construction will see you good for miles, but if you like to explore and push the limits of what 'gravel' might be (and who even knows exactly what that is) then it's a significantly better tyre than it deserves to be on lumpier, bumpier and muddier off-road tracks.

Verdict

Hardy blacktop and hardpack gravel tyre that does all that and isn't afraid to steer onto proper off-road