Airace Infinity ST Steel Floor Pump £50

At a glance A pricey and meticulously engineered track pump that will achieve extraordinary pressures in both presta and shrader valve tubes

Tested by
Jonathan Manning, tester for the bike list

Value

Performance

It's an irrational grievance, but I hate paying for air. Every other commodity carries a fee, from electricity to fuel to water, but air is the last life essential that's free of charge. (Unless you're a scuba diver).

So it makes me bristle when I have to buy a token on a filling station forecourt to pump up my car tyres. I know that I'm really paying to hire the pump, rather than buy the air, but having paid a fortune for a tankful of fuel it seems the least the oil company could do is give away a few litres of air.

The same logic has regrettably applied to my bike pumps in recent months. After a disappointing experiment with a Vento track pump bought from Argos I resorted to a hand pump, and got used to an unsatisfactory, slightly spongey ride. Then my bike came back from a service at the local bike shop with tyres harder than Vinnie Jones' glare, rolling resistance and puncture susceptibility declined dramatically, and I realised there was no alternative but to invest in another track pump. And if I'm going to 'pay for air' I might as well acquire a decent quality pump.

So let me introduce you to the Airace Infinity ST, a magnificent piece of engineering. It's heavy, its steel barrel and base are beautifully finished, and most importantly it works like a dream.

The cap locks onto the tube valve with a vice like grip, secured by a stiff lever, and it takes barely half-a-dozen pumps to fill the tubes to extraordinary pressures. An air bleeder button position Airace Infinity Cap ed underneath the lever allows you to easily reduce the pressure by 2-3 psi at a time if you get carried away pumping and forget to look at the easy to read gauge.

For once the instructions can be ignored as they suggest that a rubber bung needs to be reversed depending on which valve type you are attaching to. The valve cap on the Infinity ST will cleverly fit both presta and schrader valves without any adjustment required - ideal when pumping up the family's bikes prior to a Sunday afternoon ride.

The benefit has been even more extreme for my road bike, where pressures in excess of 100psi are easily achieved. If anything, the pressure gauge under-measures the tyre pressure, a lesson learnt the hard way as a Michelin Latex tube exploded at just above 120psi. The official stats boast a maximum pressure of 240psi (16.5 bar), but I have not been able to test this.

Overall, this is a mighty piece of kit that will keep your road and MTB tyres at the ideal pressures, with barely any effort on your part. Superb.

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