Conti TKC80² arrives in Australia

Forty years of experience and countless adventure yarns: Continental’s second-generation TKC80² range lands in Australia!

In 1985, the pointy end of the adventure world was an 800cc, 50hp, roughly 200kg BMW R 80 G/S. That was the year Continental unveiled the TKC80, and that blocky 50/50 knobby has been turning up on adventure bikes ever since. Conti quietly updated the spec over the decades but left that famous tread pattern alone.

Here’s the rub, though. Today’s flagship adventure bikes are heavier, make roughly triple the horsepower, and get ridden hard on wet bitumen as well as dirt. Every big-bore adventure rider knows the trade-off. Fit an aggressive knobby and your bike hooks up beautifully in the dirt, right up until the bitumen turns wet and the whole thing starts feeling like a shopping trolley on a greasy servo floor.

The headline act is a new compound with RainGrip technology, a silica-activated blend engineered to find grip at a microscopic level on wet roads.

It hasn’t gone soft in the dirt, either. A new tread design brings extra biting edges, staggered shoulder blocks and optimised block geometry for more mechanical grip and strong mileage. Underneath, a reworked carcass and wider offset blocks are built to cope with the weight, horsepower and torque of modern adventure bikes, keeping things stable and comfortable at speed on the asphalt, gravel and beyond.

RainGrip looks after the wet bitumen, the extra biting edges and staggered shoulder blocks look after the dirt, the reworked carcass looks after stability at speed.

The Continental TKC80² comes in four fronts (19” & 21”) and six rears (17” & 18”), all tubeless type.