Yes, Continental routinely mislabels the thread-count. There are three plies under the crown and they simply triple the ply thread-count as if we couldn’t do our own multiplication if we wanted to for some strange reason. This practice is probably illegal but the regulators have bigger fish to fry.
The thread-count of each casing ply, i.e. the figure of comparison with other manufacturers’ tyres, is 60 per inch as I said. The claimed weight is 300 g for the 25 mm model as I said. Average weight off the production line is probably more like 320 g or they would have called it 200-and-something.
I assume it’s slower than the regular clincher with a latex tube because of the way the two tyres are constructed. For that not to be the case, the tubeless version would have to have a different tread compound or depth, which is possible but not in favour of the tubeless version. I wasn’t born yesterday so I pay little heed to claims like 5% faster [than some unspecified alternative]. Continental doesn’t even sell latex tubes so you can be sure they weren’t comparing to that. Where does Continental make this claim anyway? I only see second-hand versions.
All that is unimpressive on paper, and so is Continental’s willingness to put out a tubeless tyre before establishing a standard with the other big players. But perhaps they have reason to believe that a published standard is imminent.
