Big in the road bike world, Vittoria is making a major MTB push. But one of their established all round trail tyres is the Vittoria Morsa.

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Packed with technology (and the initials to go with it), it’s available in a massive range of shapes and sizes. This TNT G+ Isotech model is tubeless-ready and pretty lightweight for an enduro-rated tyre at under 900g. The four-compound tread mix uses Graphene, a new, ultra-resistant ‘super material’, in the form of powder in the rubber blend.

For toughness in rough ground, a reinforced carcass helps resist punctures and cuts, but this casing shows premature signs of thread wear and sidewall fatigue if you use the wide cornering groove to slam into turns too much. The pointy, siped edge blocks are ok in dry stuff, but the lower profile tread centre tread is a bit drifty in loose dirt and loam braking hard. This ramped central strip is quite shallow, and the flip side of the reduced grip (or the sophisticated compound), means the Morsa rolls super fast with almost semi-slick speed. On top of this exceptional turnover on mellower trails, the tread blocks appear to scrub down pretty evenly too.

This lighter Morsa casing isn’t that supportive, and, on wide-ish 30mm rims, twists and deforms too much even at harder pressures if you corner or brake really aggressively. It feels like the sidewall plies are orientated differently to other tyres here and less stable under heavy rider loads. Vittoria’s biggest issue though is its tyre just isn’t grippy enough to really push on or stop rapidly in the wet or dry under certain combinations of mud, rocks and roots, and can come severely, unpredictably unstuck.