Thule Speedway 3 Bike Trunk Mounted Rack Review

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Review of a Thule Speedway 3 Bike Trunk Mounted Rack

Today we are going to show you part number TH962XT from Thule. This is the Thule Speedway Three-Bike Carrier. And this is a trunk-mounted rack. This is also available in a two-bike version, known as part number TH961XT. First we will point out the Thule Fit Dial here. Basically, what this does is adjust the spacing of the rack itself as it goes onto the vehicle. It is really easy to use. There are a variety of positions that you can use it on. It is pretty easy. You actually unscrew this bolt, here. And there is one on each side we just have the one in for now. You can see that it adjusts the rack itself to fit a variety of contours on the vehicle. From something like that, that would sit on the back of a car, to an SUV, or a station wagon where it may need to be flattened out. And what is nice about the instructions that come with this, the Dial Fit actually tells you what position to use for the type of vehicle you have. It makes it real easy to match up to your vehicle right off the bat. And also the arms, right here, do swing out of the way if you need to. There is one button on each side. Just push them in and they rotate down. Or, if you would like, you can actually take them apart.

All right, let us go ahead and put this on the vehicle. We have already dialed to fit our SUV here. It is pretty simple. Basically, for the most part, you want to have the bar sitting on the trunk lid itself and the bumper. You take one of your top straps and just hold it into place. And it usually will catch the groove at the top of the hatch. You have one on each side. Take your second strap that goes on the side here, and you can catch it on the edge. Sometimes you may have to work up from the bottom edge to the place that you need to. And just keep tension on it. And the other half of the strap catches on the bottom edge of the trunk itself. You might want to take up some slack if you need to. And then take your last hook and put it underneath this edge, here. Now, you may need to open up the hatch to get into it in some models, or you can just loosen it up and slide it around the edge again.

OK, let us go ahead and start taking up slack. Now, they do not need to be tight - but just take up some slack so everything stays in its place. And you repeat it for the other side. All right, once you have the straps in there in the right spots, then you go ahead and tighten them down. Basically, you just want to snug them up. You do not want to have a lot of force on them, but you want to make sure that the rack is secure on the vehicle itself. We will go ahead and start on one side and just tighten up the strap. It is kind of a good idea to push the rack into the vehicle and then take up the slack. And do a little bit on each side at a time to keep everything even, and make sure your rack stays even on the back of the vehicle, too. Then you can do the top straps - again, keeping the tension as even as possible. And if you have it done right, it should be snug enough where you can actually move the car with it. OK, and the last step is to go ahead and take your remaining straps and bundle them up as best as possible. So you can do anything you want. You can wind it up, maybe zip-tie it to the strap itself, or get another type of strap to hold these into place. It is totally up to the consumer.

All right, let us go ahead and install a bike and show you how it looks on the back of the vehicle. And the bicycle is strapped into place and definitely will not go anywhere. And we will go ahead and show you some of the details of some of the cradles. All right, you can see the cradles here. They are really nice. They have a flexible rubber material on the bottom of each cradle so it does not mess up your bikes. And also you can see there are little grooves inside there for a cable so that does not rub up against your bike.

And you also have two points where you can anchor the strap at, too. So you can move it along the left or right side, depending on the configuration of your bike. And it does come standard with the anti-sway cradles. Again, these are optional, so you can take these on or off if you want. They just snap on or off. And again, they have a strap down here which is fully adjustable. You actually have four points of contact for the strap - again, depending on how your bike can utilize it. The bicycle rack does come with a strap to keep the wheels from spinning around as you go down the road and to keep the handlebars straight. We will just actually wrap it around this one frame here for a demonstration, but you can wrap it around all three bikes to keep everything nice and straight. All right, and that covers our review of part number TH962XT, the Thule Speedway 3.