Peaty’s Holeshot Fast Flow Tubeless Valves

The Peaty’s Holeshot Fast Flow Tubeless Valves are a genuinely impressive upgrade over standard Presta valves. The airflow is fantastic, the design is clever and they make setting up and maintaining a tubeless tyre considerably less painful. At £34.99 they are expensive for a pair of valves, but the quality and thinking behind them justifies the price.

The main innovation with the Holeshot Fast Flow is where the valve mechanism sits. On a standard Presta valve the seal is at the top of the stem, which restricts how wide it can be made and the airflow. Peaty’s has moved the whole mechanism down inside the rim, which means the stem can be made significantly wider and the airflow dramatically increased.

They aren’t the first company to try this. We’ve previously looked at the Reserve Fillmore Valves which do broadly the same thing, only without the same serviceability.

According to Peaty’s, at 45psi the Holeshot flows at 110 litres per minute compared to 54 litres per minute for a standard Presta. In use, that difference is noticeable and it makes seating a tyre considerably easier. It still couldn’t solve my worst sealing tyre/rim combo, but it did work very well with others.

The valve itself is made from 7075 aluminium with a stainless steel core, and both internal and external surfaces are anodised to stop sealant from sticking.

Sealant clogging a valve core is something I have experienced far too many times (fun fact, I have bought pipe cleaners exclusively for unclogging my existing valves), and the wider design combined with the anodised surfaces deals with it well. I have only been running these for about six weeks, but I have no reason to believe they would suddenly start blocking now.

Because the mechanism sits inside the rim, the vulnerable part of the design is also protected. Peaty’s says if the shaft takes a knock, the seal stays intact inside the rim and the tyre stays inflated. I’ll be honest, this has never once happened to me on a road bike in 25 years of riding, but I guess there is a theoretical chance of it happening on gravel?

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The valves come in 42mm (11g per pair) and 60mm (14g per pair) lengths to cover different rim depths and they are available in 12 Chris King matched colourways, if you’re into that kind of thing.

They are great for setting up new tyres, seating is generally very good with the blasts from my tubeless charging pumps being noticeably stronger, and being able to add sealant through the valve without removing the core is bloody brilliant.

The caps are worth a mention too. Rather than standard dust caps, one doubles as a spoke key, as Peaty’s has included for many years, and the other is a chain lube applicator – although I can’t ever see myself using it that way on the go.

These are small details, but show that Peaty’s has thought the product through, rather than just solving one problem and stopping there.

Crucially, the valves are fully serviceable at home too, which in a world where too much cycling kit is designed to be thrown away is very welcome. You can remove the circlip at the base, clean the internals and replace the seals, if needed, with no special tools required.

Peaty’s backs the valves with a lifetime guarantee and sells service kits for £5.99, so there’s no reason these shouldn’t last indefinitely. They’re also fully compatible with standard Presta pump heads, CO2 inflators and hand pumps, so there’s nothing new to buy.

Value

At £34.99 for a pair, these aren’t cheap for something most people don’t give much thought to. However, given that they should theoretically last forever with a cheap service kit able to bring them new life, this isn’t bad at all.

The obvious comparison is with the aforementioned Reserve Fillmore Valves that similarly move the valve to within the rim, with the same RRP of £34.99. However, I would argue that with the service kits, the colour varieties, and the included caps, the Peaty’s offering is better value.

You could also compare them to the Juice Lubes Tubeless Valves 65mm which are only £5 cheaper at £29.99, but don’t have any of the same innovations or product longevity.

Conclusion

The Peaty’s Holeshot Fast Flow Tubeless Valves are one of those products that make you wonder why it took this long for someone to sort it out properly. The airflow improvement is immediately noticeable, the design is clever throughout and the attention to detail, from the anodised internals to the functional caps to the lifetime guarantee, suggests a product built by people who actually ride. If you run tubeless these are worth every penny.