You treat your road bike like it can ride over just about any road surface, and for the most part, it can. Though you’ve been tempted towards the gravel path, you’ve stuck with your tried-and-true road geometry, and weathered the consequences of choosing to ride on torn-up, rutted, chip-sealed roads to enjoy the pastoral scenes and rolling rural hillsides to which they often lead. Because of this, you spend just about as much time stopped on the shoulders of those roads changing flats as you do riding them, and if you’d like to change that pattern, investing in Michelin’s brand new Power Protection Plus Clincher Tire would make a good place to start. As the long-awaited successor to Michelin’s aging Pro4 line, Power delivers four brand new road tire options, each situated neatly in a discipline-specific category but with the entire line displaying improvements in grip, rolling resistance, and puncture protection. Michelin designed the Protection Plus to be the go-to tire for your rides along the most neglected back roads, constructing it with a resin-reinforced rubber compound known as Bi-Compound, then reinforcing it with protection in the form of its Bead-to-Bead Protek technology and beefed-up sidewalls. This composition, according to Michelin, gives the Protection Plus 20% more flat-resisting puncture protection than any of the brand’s other tires, past or present, and though many have assumed the Protection Plus was designed to be a gravel tire, Michelin insists that was created for use on the roads. Like the rest of the Power line, it does enjoy improvements to rolling resistance and grip, but the flat resistance is the shining achievement of this model.