I agree there’s some amount of bracketing going on, but it’s also hampered because it’s not a level playing field. We still see that the general trend in tire widths and travel is slowly trending towards “more”.
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Totally agreed. My next commuter/offroad bike that will replace my hardtail will be a gravel bike with flatbars and an aggressive geometry (I’m leaning towards the Nicolai Argon GX).
As we discussed earlier, I think for those bike a frame that accepts wide tires (~2.1") on 27.5" wheels and 700c “narrow” ~45 mm tires makes sense as you’d have similar handling characteristics for both. For some reason, this hasn’t been very successful in the market. 
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curious where you are seeing the new pathfinder logo are faster? have not seen/heard that before
Spot on. I remember arguing with someone on the internet (imagine that) whether you can feel a difference of a few psi of pressure. My argument was that you totally can if you are close to resonance points on different surfaces. If I ride on good tarmac vs. bad tarmac in specific places, I can feel the difference if I drop the pressure by 3–5 psi even on road tires. It gets tricky if on a single ride I ride on roads with rough and smooth tarmac. I have to decide what to optimize for.
For offroad tires this is even more true. Another factor we haven’t talked about is fun: do you enjoy being underbiked, for instance? Or do you want to have something that rolls smoothly over anything, and lets you go anywhere that XC mountain bikes can go?
I think what is happening is that gravel races have become gnarlier just like XC racing has become more technical over the years. So the bikes have adapted to those new, gnarlier races.
The most likely evolution is simply a bifurcation into different types of bikes just like in the mountain biking world. An XC bike is different from a trail bike to an enduro bike.
The next obvious step is that suspension will become more popular on some gravel bikes, and you have a blend of XC bikes (hardtail and fullys) and gravel bikes.
We are just looking at it from the perspective of speed. A lot of people in Germany used to buy hardtails for everyday use because they were robust, relatively cheap, relatively simple and the wide tires gave riders a lot of comfort.
These bikes are now being displaced by gravel bikes, at least where I live (which is, unfortunately, flat-as-a-pancake). Unless you are talking about ebikes, then eMTBs are all the rage. Who cares about rolling resistance, when you have a motor helping you?
As you correctly wrote, the pendulum will eventually swing back towards the middle. Maybe we will realize that for most intents and purposes, clearance for 50 mm wide tires are good enough and that you want to stay in the 40–50 mm range.
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I did rolldown testing on them myself after seeing it mentioned in an IG comment from someone. I’m trying to get them added to the BRR voting list but no luck so far. I think they changed the casing slightly as they are more supple than the pre-2024 models.
I’m not sure it’s a pendulum, are we expecting road racing bikes to go back to 23-25mm tires? Or MTBs to go back to 2.1-2.25?
How have the statistics looked with 2.2+ tires other than the continental race king? That seems to be the tire mentioned for the wide-tire argument 99% of the time.
Also, over say a 5 hour, 100 mile course, what are the expectations for increased finish time from a continental race king, vs one of the fastest 45mm tires?
No, the idea is that 35 mm is too narrow (starting point of the pendulum on the left) and perhaps 2.25“ too wide (pendulum reaches maximum deflection on the right), and the it reaches equilibrium somewhere in the middle.
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TLDR the whole thread… Do you know if these “fastest compounds” on road? Drum? Actual dirt? Mud? Sand, loose conditions?
I mean Koretzky did win XCC this year with 47 pathfinders. 
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And he passed 2nd place on pavement. Blevins showed that 2.5 is pretty fast too. I think it shows that optimization isn’t simple
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The data I have comes from BRR, so drum. But I’ve also set some PRs on both paved and dirt (including light singletrack) on the Thunder Burts. Anecdotal for sure, but I’ve time probably 5-6 different tires on those same segments…
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Somewhat depends on road surface, but this goes back to the point that bigger isn’t always better. I run 32 GP 5k’s on my gravel bike all the time for road rides and they are super smooth and fast running around 50 psi. And when I have a big MTB race coming up, I’ll spend all my time on my MTB (including group rides on the road) and run 38’s or 40’s. The typical big volume tire isn’t faster on reasonably smooth road at road speeds regardless of what kind of bike you are on.
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I’m reading this discussion and find it really interesting.
Some comments:
People talk about the tire size problematic as if it is some deep, extremely complex philosophical question. It isn’t.
All its needed is testing. One picks a few segments representative of their use or race, tests different setups there and picks the fastest. Its that simple.
We have a hard time to wrap our heads around this, but even high level gravel and XC teams (road slightly less so lately) tend to suck at testing, its simply not in the culture yet. Riders are more often than not terrified of changing anything in their setup and there is too much reliance on dogma. This is changing, but will take some time.
Speaking of testing, one factor that delayed tire size evolution in road and XC was simply the lack of suitable products to test. 10 years ago, if a road team wanted to test 30 or 32c tires, only touring or CX models were available in that size. If a XC team wanted to test something bigger than 2.1, mostly enduro/DH tires were available in 2.4. This is very different in gravel, because the next bigger size is already available in a suitable construction (XC tires). This facilitates testing and will likely make this transition much faster.
Many contributors here are framing things as if these different setups are a zero sum game. I disagree for 2 reasons:
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surely, if one goes too far in a certain direction, tradeoffs start to show, but there are plenty of modifications to a bike that actually increase its performance range. I’m going to use a silly example, but comparing a 1999 top notch XC bike with Nino’s Spark, there’s very little that the former is better than the later at, within the use envelope of a XC bike. Sometimes it is argued that some of the trends we see are due to the very different demands of XCO in later years, but one only has to check the setups used at XCM (those races are often glorified gravel races) and the bike setups tend to be quite similar to the XCO ones. More often than not the same tires as used. So when someone argues that, because the 2.2 tires are better in the chunk they’ll make the bike worse at champagne gravel, this is not obvious to me. Bike setup is not a zero sum game, just look at the evolution of road bikes.
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I read some arguments in the sense that if gravel frames are to be designed to accept 2.2s, then the bikes will be/look weird if ones wants to put on 35s and ride some road. Keegan Swenson couldn’t care less how his Stigmata (or Highball…) looks or behaves with road tires. He wants his bike to be as good as possible on the gravel races of his calendar. Plenty of us still look at gravel bikes through this prism of a quiver killer bike that needs to kind of perform in a lot of different uses. But as gravel racing matures and grows, gravel bikes will more and more evolve to excel at…gravel races. My personal feeling is that what many people look for today in a gravel bike is rather the logical conclusion of an allroad bike and that allroad bikes will in the next few years mature and occupy that niche.
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Unfortunately, it really isn’t that simple. Testing a few segments from a course that can can span hundreds of miles is not a good proxy for how different tires perform across the entire course.
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To say it is not a perfect representation of an entire 200m long course I can agree with, but to go as far to say it’s not a good proxy, I’ll have to disagree. Testing will always be the creation of a simplified, repeatable model of a larger and more complex system. Otherwise it’s simply not feasible to test anything. In the end, what’s the alternative to test representative segments of an intended route ? Ride the whole course and hope it is repeatable ? Argue in a forum about it ?
Never let perfection be the enemy of good
If you are testing on some of the roughest sections of a course like Big Sugar, we know wider tires are gonna do better (up to what width? ). But there are a lot of smoother gravel and roads, as well. Are wider tires the best choice in those sections? Maybe, maybe not.
If not, do the gains realized in the rougher sections offset the losses in the smoother sections?
That illustrates the complexity in only using short segments for testing.
It is similar to aero testing….in the late 00’s and early 10’s, there was a LOT of extrapolation going on based on some testing. But as we learned more, gathered more data and developed new testing protocols, we found out that many of the “rules” of aero were wrong……helmets that were deemed fast were actually slow, 19mm tires were replaced by 23mm tires, etc.
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Riders know the course, they know enough to classify the different sections along the course and to calculate the impacts of different setups. It’s not rocket science. This method is used according different disciplines and sports, gravel racing is not special.
And again, I need to respectfully point out that your main argument seems to be that this method is not perfect (which it isn’t) while failing to provide any alternative. Are you implying that this is an impossible problem to solve and one shouldn’t bother and just keep using the same 40mm tires everyone else is using ?
And, even if you disagree with this method, my main point remains, which is that teams/riders need to test more, regardless of the protocol.
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This comparison was already made in this thread but here goes anyway: there was a GCN video few years ago, where they tested a section of pavé on the Paris-Roubaix course. Conclusion was that a hardtail with big tires was the fastest on this particular section. Does that mean you should run a hardtail for Paris-Roubaix? No, not at all. The rest of the course is extremely fast and you’d have no chance to follow the head of the course.
So no, it’s not that simple.
The more varied the terrain, the more difficult it is to optimize for every given situation. Something that doesn’t really happen in road racing - except maybe Paris-Roubaix. There will be tradeoffs on both ends at some point.
I think top riders are already testing a lot. It’s just not always public info like in the DJ videos. If you want to test different tires in a race setup, please go ride and post your findings as some users here already did. It’s really time intensive and many amateurs have lower hanging fruits to pick before they save a couple watts in RR from a faster tire.
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Yeah, and as a consequence, Paris-Roubaix is the road race where manufacturers have always experimented a lot (including suspension tech). Having plenty of sections of bad cobbles where I live (including one segment I have to cross daily on my commute), I can understand how they shape road races.
Yes, and this shows the importance of route design in races. I remember incarnations of the BWR where back then the fastest setup for pros was a road setup with 28 mm tires. Now that won’t cut it for gravel races.
XC has developed similarly, the courses have gotten more and more technical over the years. With few (sometimes notable) exceptions rides opt for full suspension XC bikes as opposed to hardtails. Overall, this is a good development for us regular people as that has resulted in XC bikes that are much more capable on trails.
I hope the evolution of gravel racing will do something similar. I really love how my aero road bike rides, but it is damn annoying that I sometimes have to turn around when the road becomes gravel or the cobbles so bad that I’m close to puncturing. (Ask me how I know. 
) There is something to be said for a road bike that can handle short segments of gravel without you having to give it a second thought. Or a bike that feels at home offroad, but connecting offroad segments on pavement doesn’t feel like an exercise in stupidity.
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