Cyclingnews Awards: Chain Wax

Our best chain wax awards is the accompanying piece to our chain lube winners all of which are taken from our best bike chain lube and best bike wax buyers' guides. 

Hot waxing, waxing, or immersive waxing (whatever term you want to use) offers fantastic contamination protection and resistance, lengthens chain life dramatically, keeps drivetrains spotless and offers very low drag. Sound perfect? That's because it pretty much is, and in dry conditions the wax will pretty much always come out on top. As such, any product from amongst our winners is amongst the top-performing chain coatings anywhere. Any of the below products will provide excellent performance, but it was my job to try and categorise them somehow. 

After some initial setup effort, living with wax is easy and we don't think it's the faffy process it's sometimes made out to be. Try it, if you are interested in some extra drivetrain gains. 

There are fewer wax products on the market generally so there is a smaller product pool to select from at present. Like our chain lubricant guide, waxes have been applied and tested and also referenced against Zero Friction independent testing and results.  

The Winners

Best Overall

Silca Secret Chain Wax takes the best overall spot from our waxes. The Silca Wax pellets (500g) come in a boil-in-the-bag pouch, which means you don't need to go the whole hog and get a slow cooker to wax your chain with it, just pop your chain in the bag and place it in hot water. This could make for an easier introduction to waxing if you want to give things a try. 

The wax also contains nano-scale tungsten disulfide, an extremely slippery component. Secret Chain wax is also compatible with Silca Super Secret drip lube meaning you can extend re-waxing intervals and use the two products together in Silca's wax system. Like all the waxes here, you will need to ensure your chain is thoroughly clean before waxing, but once you're set up this is an incredible wax. 

Best Value

Molten Speed Wax is a fantastic performing wax, which takes the Best Value award due to being more affordable than Rex and Silca Wax options and containing slightly more product than Silca hot melt - 520g. In the same way Silca is compatible with Super Secret Chain lube as a sort of ad-on, Molten Speed Wax also makes a race powder which can be applied to a waxed chain to lower drag even further by a claimed 6% or around half a watt, which will appeal to any racer looking for an advantage. 

Molten Speed Wax updated their formula with the newer version featuring Nano WS2 and the wax now comes in solid pucks, unlike the Silca Pellets. A two-puck (520g of wax) recyclable cardboard tube contains 1lb of wax (although larger quantities are available), which will wax your chain for thousands of kilometres. It dries completely cleanly and delivers fantastic low-drag performance and longevity. I've used Molten Speed Wax on my own bike's drivetrain for a few years now and for the money, I think it's one of the best performance gains out there. 

Honorable Mention

Rex Black Diamond wax takes our Honourable mention spot. Rex has decades of experience making low-friction waxes and products for the ski market. Its Black Diamond wax uses refined paraffin and a friction modifier to achieve excellent longevity. 

Rex's main calling card is the fact you can tailor the wax blend to suit your needs. A box of Black Diamond contains 12 solid wax blocks. You can choose to use an 11+1 blend or a 4+1 mix. 11+1 just means melting all the wax blocks together for all-around riding. But the 4+1 means 4 base paraffin blocks +1 friction additive block which concentrates the wax mix even further and provides extra durability for something of a super blend.  

Black Diamond set a single application longevity record in Zero Friction testing so if you are interested in waxing but don't want to have to repeat the process every week or so then Black Diamond may be a great option to go for.