Choosing the best motorcycle tire for your street bike is balancing act. You want good grip but you also want reasonable longevity, and those two factors are often at odds with each other. You definitely want to choose a tire that works for the kind of riding you do. And, since motorcycle tires aren’t cheap and even the best ones don’t last that long, you’d naturally like to find one that’s reasonably priced.
It’s not easy. But after more than a full year in all kinds of conditions, I feel like I’ve hit the jackpot with the Dunlop Mutant tires I’ve been using on my old warhorse Triumph Speed Triple. And their reasonable price and wide range of capability means they’re probably a good choice for many street riders, in my opinion.
I’m not the only one who thinks so, either. A wander through other reviews on the internet finds a lot of positivity and Ryan over at Fortnine even called the Mutant his current favorite tire in a video titled “Best Cheap Motorcycle Tires of 2023.” It’s not often you see “favorite” and “cheap” referring to the same motorcycle performance part.
So let’s add my experience to that chorus and see what the Mutant has going for it.
The tread pattern, which is more complex than most street tires, is the first thing you notice about the Dunlop Mutants. But there’s more to them than grooves. Dunlop photos.
Test riding the Dunlop Mutant tires
Dunlop says the Mutant benefits from a dual compound, with stickier rubber at the edges for grip and a longer-lasting compound in the center. It uses Dunlop’s Jointless Belt construction for consistency and stability. And the high-silica compound helps with grip in wet and cool conditions. All that is in addition to the Mutants’ most noticeable feature, which is the tread pattern, with far more grooves and siping than you usually see on street rubber. The Mutants actually remind me of another Dunlop tire I have positive memories of, the no-longer-available D616. It was a 17-inch street tire that also had some pretty aggressive tread blocks and came as original equipment on the Buell Ulysses when it came out in 2006. I liked that tire enough when I test rode the Ulysses that I put a set on my 1997 Speed Triple.
Over the 26 years I’ve owned my 27-year-old Speed Triple, it has been through approximately 25 rear tires. That number is artificially high because for many years, when my Kawasaki Versys was doing most of the mileage and I was using my Triumph Daytona for track days, I’d put fresh Dunlop Q3+ tires on the Daytona for a track day and mount the half-used tires on the Speed Triple. But in earlier years, when the Speed Triple was my primary bike, it wore longer-lasting sport-touring tires of that era, such as Metzeler Z6s and later Dunlop Roadsmarts, as well as the D616s and others.
When I moved the Speedy from storage in West Virginia to its new home in Massachusetts in late 2022, it needed a new rear tire, so I decided to try the Mutants and mounted a new rear. I intended to put on a new front tire at the same time, but due to circumstances that add up to a long boring story I won’t go into, I didn’t mount a new front tire until the following spring. So I currently have a little over 4,000 miles on the rear and a little less than 3,000 miles on the front.
My Honda VFR800 Interceptor is my ride when I’m going any distance these days, so the old Speed Triple, now with more than 122,000 miles on the odometer, sees less frequent duty. I ride it for local transportation, the occasional sport ride on some of the local curvy roads, and to explore the environs in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts where I moved to last year. My plan was to buy a used dual-sport last winter to use for transportation in the colder months and for exploring the unpaved roads in these hills, but buyers were still clinging to pandemic pricing even though pandemic-related shortages of dual-sports no longer exist, so I didn’t find a bike I wanted to buy at a reasonable price.
All the better for Mutant tire testing, however, because that meant I rode the Speed Triple in winter and summer: on cold and wet streets when I needed to get somewhere, on curvy roads on warm days when I was out for fun, and more often than I expected on unpaved roads when I decided to take a shortcut I saw on the map and the road surprised me and turned to dirt. That’s a broad range of conditions for a street tire to handle, and the Mutants have exceeded expectations across the board.
There are more unpaved roads around my current home in Western Massachusetts than anywhere I’ve lived. The Speed Triple, with its firm suspension, 17-inch wheels, and café racer riding position, is hardly built for excursions off pavement, but the Dunlop Mutant tires work surprisingly well on mild dirt-and-gravel roads like these.
For as old as it (and its suspension) is, the Speed Triple still handles entertainingly well, and the Mutants surprised me with their performance for sport riding. Remember that the Speed Triple was mostly rolling on Q3+ sport tires in recent years and you can see that I had a solid frame of reference. Like the Dunlop D616s of many years ago, when I looked at the tread on the Mutants, I didn’t expect sport-tire performance, but they provide plenty of grip for as fast as I’m ever going to ride on the street.
But often a tire that provides that kind of grip on a curvy road on a warm summer day is less than ideal on a cold and wet evening when darkness is falling and you’re just trying to get home safely. I don’t go on any long trips in the Massachusetts winter, for obvious reasons, but using the Speed Triple for short rides showed that the Mutants provided good grip even in adverse conditions and didn’t give that rock-hard feeling and lack of feedback that some sport tires do when they’re not in their preferred temperature range. I haven’t done a lot of rain riding on the tires, but the high silica content and scaly tread have worked well on wet roads, even in low temperatures.
Then there’s the bonus. Quite a few times as I’ve been learning the roads around my new home over the past year and a half, I’ve started down a country lane only to find the pavement ended. The Mutants are no 50-50 dual-sport tire, to be sure (and my Speed Triple is far from an adventure-touring bike), but the extra tread helps once I leave the pavement, planned or not. I could see these being a good choice for an adventure motorcycle that doesn’t see any significant off-road duty — assuming the needed sizes are available.
The last piece of the puzzle is longevity. At 4,000 miles, I’d estimate my rear tire is roughly between one third and one half of the way through its lifespan, which is pretty normal for most sport-touring tires that I’d be likely to use instead of the Mutants. By comparison, I’ve been using Dunlop Roadsmart IIIs on my VFR800 and the last time I replaced the rear tire, it gave me a little over 15,000 miles of service. (I haven’t tried the successor Roadsmart IVs yet, which cost a few dollars more but are claimed to last longer.) Overall, I’m quite happy with the choice of the Roadsmarts on my VFR800 “touring” bike, because I think they do provide slightly more mileage, and the Mutants on my daily rider Speed Triple, which kind of looks like a mutant itself, anyway.
The riding life isn’t always warm sunshine and hot, sticky traction. The Dunlop Mutants work well when the roads are cool or wet, such as on this Christmas Day ride last year.
Conclusion: Mutants are definitely worth a look for these riders
Dunlop Mutants come in a variety of common sporty sizes for 17-inch rear wheels and 17-inch, 18-inch, and 19-inch front wheels. Prices at RevZilla currently range from $184.95 for the least expensive front to $253.95 for the most expensive rear. That puts them in the same price range, or maybe a few dollars less, than the other competitors you’d be looking at from the top brands.
Bottom line, I think the Mutants are a good choice particularly for riders of standard or sporty bikes who want a tire that handles a wide range of conditions. They’d also be worth a look for a rider of an ADV bike who rarely plans to go off pavement and might be considering a street-focused dual-sport tire like a Pirelli Scorpion Trail II or a Continental Trail Attack 3, just to mention a couple of examples.
As someone who has been riding motorcycles for 40-plus years, the quality of the tires today is one of the greatest improvements in the experience. There are a lot of good choices. Mutants are one of them.
