What are the dominant gravel bike brands? Has Santa Cruz moved up, down, or stayed the same in this ranking?
How many racers are using a suspension fork over prior years? I do have some data on this, as far as I can tell it’s a fairly significant number. The Southeast Gravel Series went from 1-2 suspension forks at a given event in 2021/2022 to 10+ this year. And this is a small local series with around 300 racers a year with maybe 700-800 racer days.
We know XC tires are now significantly more in demand for gravel racing. So, is your assertion that youtube, podcasts, with race results from the feature star - does not contribute to, and at times totally, drive consumer demand?
I have been using Racing Rays/Racing Ralphs on my commuter for nearly two years and they last several thousand km on asphalt. I do about 160–200 km/week on them and they last for about one year. I have also ridden them offroad quite a bit and they are great. If you need more bite, mount a Nobby Nic on the front wheel.
In fact, I have been thinking about getting tires that are more optimized for road riding next, but longevity is something that I have been focussing on:
The tread on the Vittoria Terrenos that are on my wife’s commuter haven’t lasted for 500 km. (She doesn’t ride that much.)
I have heard Schwalbe’s G-One RS similarly don’t last very well, even though that are among the fastest gravel tires out there. Bicycle RR gave them very high marks.
Schwalbe G-One Speed are another option, but again, I don’t know how long those knobs last.
Schwalbe G-One Allround might last longer.
Thunderburts have also been mentioned to not last very long on pavement, so I guess those are also not an option. But at a certain point, I am just back at the Racing Ray/Racing Ralph combo.
The tire in that gap is the Terra Hardpack 50mm. Tested equal to a 2.1" Thunder Burt on BRR, and measures exactly 50mm on my 24iw rims. In addition they cost like 25€. I honestly think if this tire was Black Chili compound, cost 3 times as much and performed exactly the same in the test, it would be very popular.
That said, the 2.1" Thunder Burt is really also a 50mm tire. They measure 51mm on my 24iw rims. The Cinturato H 50 mentioned above is just as big as the Burt. I’ll be using the Burts for racing and the Hardpacks for commuting.
Regarding the 650 B/27.5 for a gravel bike, I just learned that the gravel series leader in our local series runs 27.5. This dude is super fast and is competing for the win each race. I’m not sure if he’d be faster on 29ers, but anecdotally the 27.5 certainly doesn’t appear to be holding him back.
Ok, challenge accepted. I just put two of them in my shopping cart for 25 € each. Even if they don’t last as long, they seem cheap enough to take a gamble on.
Good stuff. I’ve put 2k km on mine, maybe 70% pavement 30% gravel. The front tire looks basically new, the rear has a little bit of wear and two plugs in it, one from a sharp rock and one from me being dumb bottoming out on a curb - definitely no fault of the tire. It’s a semi-slick so there are no knobs to wear out.
I think their weakness is cornering rather than durability. Consider a Burt on the front if that’s an issue.
2.2 Fast Traks juuust barely fit in the Crux fork, but the hairs rub the fork side. I’ll trim the side knobs, install some helicopter tape and roll with it and 47mm in the back.
And Rudy has become quite useless for the XC tire hype. 2.2 in it looks quite laughable. Keegan and Tobin ran this fork last year for a few races, but to someone’s point above just because the main dude runs something - that’s not enough to get it viral. You need others to want to do it. And MTB tires - lots of people get behind it, cause it makes sense. Tobin ran an MTB tire before DJ last year, no one noticed and it probably messed up his Stig frame. Now they’re all on 2.2’s.
This made me think about Nino Schurter and how he switched from 27.5 to 29ers after losing the Olympics on them. The only data is that he went on to revenge his loss and dominate the next few years running them.
All the pics of these tires with the hairs is giving me big time flashbacks to my early days in Product Development and having to build up bikes for the photo shoots.
We would have to trim all those little hairs off bike tires by hand…we tried everything to get a more efficient way to do it, but the best option was little wire clippers that we found at Radio Shack.
We called it “Nubbing”, as in trimming all the nubs off the tires. Every single hair on every single tire, clipped by hand…and we usually shot dozens of bikes. It took HOURS!!
Yes, it makes sense now, but it didn’t until one of the major gravel youtubers spent hours discussing XC tires in multiple videos and podcasts, and showed real world results.
Thunder Burts and Race Kings have been known to be two of the fastest tires for almost a decade, and when BRR started testing gravel tires it was obvious they were faster than many of them. I (and others) tried both TBs and RK for gravel 7-8 years ago.
My statement wasn’t “everyone is going to do it because Keegan did it” - my statement was that demand would explode - which we have seen with XC tires and the Lauf fork, among other trends. Demand for XC tires to use on gravel racing bikes was basically 0 until recently. Now it’s probably 10% of the total USA gravel racing population is either interested in buying them soon or is already using them. Thousands of customers demanding product where just 1-2 years prior there was 0, or perhaps a few dozen.
A similar situation would occur with 650b wheels, if the most successful gravel racer started using them and winning? Of course demand would increase. This isn’t an unreasonable or unexpected event to forecast.
I was doing that today on my rear tire but, just the left side outer knobs. I also shimmed my wheel by adding two thin washers on the left to just move over the tire more towards the right by maybe a mm. It seemed to do the trick and resolved the very slight rubbing I had yesterday on my left chain stay.
I think this only holds true if they actually were faster, which they aren’t. Rene Herse’s study was unpowered with overlapping error bars. Now if someone starting winning on a wheel size bigger than 700c, then things would get interesting.
DJ without a doubt has brought a lot of attention to running bigger tires for gravel but any of the available data supports that the TB’s and RK’s are faster than the majority of gravel tires. A number of the other pro’s clearly paid attention to this and are making the shift. As the season went on it seemed there were more and more riders trying to stuff big tires into their frames.
In 2023 Sofia won Leadville on Tracers, but this didn’t lead to Tracers becoming a tire of choice for the race. The comments were more along the lines of “she won in spite of her tire choice…”. It was a really strange choice at the time but driven off her having had success on them during the Stage Race and thinking they were an advantage. She backed off this thinking this year and came out and said that they weren’t faster.
A Leadville counter-example is dropbar MTBs - DJ rode one last year and nothing really happened. Then suddenly a few weeks before this year’s race Keegan hints he’s running one and so are a few others.
Keegan didn’t set the record using them at Leadville this year but he opened up the conversation more, building on what DJ and others have been saying. How many drop bars at Leadville 2023 in the Pro field? 1-2? How many 2024? There were 2(3?) featured on Pinkbike with 2-3 more that weren’t known until race day.
This seems to have led to more elite/casual embrace of dropbar MTBs. Looking at videos and IG of Chequamegon there were probably a dozen dropbar MTBs in all fields, when again last year there were maybe 1-2.
Does this diminish next year or has another tool in the box been created that has lead to more demand? Certainly more people wanted dropbar MTBs from August of this year than they have in the past several years.
My point is, this wasn’t recognized until very recently. You can go back and read this thread and see how many refused to believe it because of whatever reasons. This belief is much more accepted today than it was 10 months ago, or really even 4 months ago.
Aero was a big unknown and DJs wind tunnel video from May of this year changed a lot of people’s minds that were wholly convinced XC tires couldn’t be faster. The available data may have shown one thing, but people were not persuaded until someone repeatedly broke it down for them and demonstrated real effectiveness.
650b wouldn’t need to be faster, it would just need to be the same speed, controlled for tire size. So if 650bx42 was the same speed as 700cx42 it would be easier to demonstrate the value of a faster 650x53+ tire. There are a lot of gravel bikes that won’t take 29x2.1/2.2 XC tires no matter how close the knobs are cut, but they’ll take 650bx53+ just fine. Unfortunately, even comparing the best tires in 700cx42/45 to 650bx2.1/2.2 I think and it seems the 700c wheel is faster. The hassle and unknowns in switching wheelsize are a big enough roadblock to keep people away.
I don’t think comparing 650bx42 to 700cx42 matters much. I think the question for me is 700cx42/45 to 650bx2.1/2.2. Many frames support both of these option, tire diameter is similar, but the 650b allows fast RK or TB casing and lower pressure with increased tire volume. Sure, switching or adding a wheelset is a barrier, but people are going to be looking to replace frames/bikes to be able to run wider tires when the existing bike might be able to do so in 650b. When the dual wheelsize compatibility for gravel was first marketed, the idea was 700c for speed and wide tires on 650b for adventure… but that was partly due to the idea that ~40mm was the fastest gravel tire size.
I guess we’ll never know for sure until someone builds a gravel velodrome…
Meanwhile, Dizzle beat DJ using 45 Challenge Getaway XP
