BRIDGESTONE BATTLAX S23

Bridgestone Five years after released the excellent S22, we are now graced with its successor. Welcome, the new Bridgestone Battlax S23.

- RENNIE SCAYSBROOK

Sports tyres are going through quite the metamorphous these days. Yes, they are still black and round and sticky, for the most part, but they are no longer allowed to be good at only one thing.

If you've ever ridden on slick tyres at a racetrack, you'll know the riding is only part of the endeavour. There are stands, tyre warmers, generators and probably a bunch of other stuff in there I'm forgetting you need to worry about... and you still need to ride fast enough to get the tyres into a working window where their grip can be properly exploited. Ride below that threshold and they won't retain the heat required to make them work, and then they can become downright dangerous.

As such, the market for a tyre that can fulfil a bunch of different needs is becoming more important to the world's manufacturers by the year. And bringing all that extra stuff to the track is a pain in the arse, anyway.

Bridgestone's Battlax S22, released in 2019, filled this one-tire-fits-most role well, but it's now been superseded by the Japanese company's latest offering.

The S23 comes to dealers' floors at a very busy time, with Dunlop's Sportmax Q5, Pirelli Diablo Rosso IV, Michelin Power 5 and Continental's ContiSportAttack 2 all offering exceptional street and track performance at competitive prices.

"The S22 was a really good product for Bridgestone, so we were not exactly starting from a blank canvas," says Bridgestone's motorcycle product manager, Dominique Plom. "We kept the form and the shape of the S22 in the S23's construction and just finetuned all the aspects to make it better in the more extreme conditions this tyre experiences."