Best Racing Gravel Bike 2026

Equipment
87

It depends on where those edge cases are happening. I did a race earlier this year on mostly tame gravel. I ran my Race King 2.2’s, mostly because I was too lazy to swap tires for a fun early season race. I honestly thought I’d regret the tire choice at the start line. What I forget about the course was how many loose corners there were all day long, including several in the last quarter mile. The difference in cornering traction/confidence between a 2.2 MTB tire at 18-19psi and a 45mm gravel tire at 25+ psi is huge. And most corners (at least early and late in gravel races) are selection points where people are pushing it as hard as possible trying to break the elastic. At one point, I was on the front going into a corner and not even pushing that hard and about 5 guys in our group slid out trying to make the corner at the same pace. And no, we certainly didn’t wait for them. Whether you call them “edge cases” or not, gravel races are often decided at selection points. Unless you are treating a gravel race like an individual TT, optimizing for selection points can often be better/faster than optimizing for the majority of the race.