Big Tires, Drop Bars, and Racing On Gravel

Tires like this WTB Resolute 50mm are becoming more common in gravel racing

"Ahh! It's just a mountain bike with drop bars now!", is what I read online recently when the subject of big 700c tires for gravel racing came up. That's a typical knee-jerk reaction to a trend that has been settling in with gravel racing at the top levels for about a year or so now. 

This bigger tire trend is setting in because of how the bicycle industry works. There are two things at play here. One: Racers, sponsors, and media want "more exciting" racing and bicycles. Bicycles  capable of handling courses with elements that make for that "excitement". Generally speaking, this trends towards more "mountain bike-like" courses. While there is an element of road racing in gravel racing these days, aero being a trend from that, it is mountain biking that is drawing gravel to its sphere of influence more and more, thus the bigger tires.

Secondly, most areas of the world do not have gravel to ride on. They have unpaved roads, and those roads are not covered with a carpet of three inch deep crushed limestone rocks in most cases. To find this, you must come to the Mid-West of the United States, where gravel racing and riding was born. 

Add those two things together and it becomes easier to see why mountain biking is more relevant and adjacent to gravel cycling world-wide than what we in the Mid-West think of as "gravel" cycling. Here gravel cycling was borne out of a necessity of road riders who were trying to get some resistance training for the road racing season. "Gravel grinders" were training rides in the Mid-West that were done on road bikes. This led to a search for some more capable components and bicycles to tackle roads here, and that is why the original gravel machines in the early twenty-teens were more road bike oriented.

A Salsa Cycles Warbird prototype as raced at Trans Iowa in April of 2012.

Back then, bigger tires were heavy, not very aerodynamic, and collected more mud in wet races. Tire sizes most gravel racers were gravitating to back then were in the 40mm - 43mm size range. 

That seemed to hold serve until something happened to gravel racing that has radically changed the top end of the sport. This change can be summed up in one word.

Money.

When prize money got the attention of retiring roadies and those athletes who weren't getting into the top tiers of road racing at the World Tour level, event promoters of the more popular gravel events started to cater their races more towards this attention-getting, tiny subset of gravel riders. This is also when most high-end gravel bicycles and components started looking like what this small subset of people wanted to see. 

Courses started popping up all over the world that were not "gravel", as in crushed rock roads, but were what are unpaved roads and trails wherever these events unfolded. Many times being the same tracks where early mountain bike events were held. This mixing of MTB type terrain and "gravel bikes" is epitomized in Life Time Events "Grand Prix" which is a mix of MTB courses and gravel events with the same field of Pro riders. While the athletes in the Grand Prix switch between MTB bikes and gravel bikes depending upon the course, one could easily see how a fatter tired, drop bar bike might end up being cross-purposed for at least two of the Grand Prix events. Both the Chequamegon 40 and Leadville 100 events might be an opportunity for this sort of "underbiking" to be an advantage, and in fact, both events saw drop bars being used. 

There is a LOT going on here that could be discussed even in more detail which would illuminate my hypothesis, but in short, I feel gravel cycling, at least as far as how traditional media, brands, and top racers will want to see things, will be more MTB influenced going forward. We are already seeing this with telescopic front forks, MTB influenced geometry, big tires, and more. 

Is this what most gravel riders need or want? Probably not in terms of the bicycles, and this will be seen very soon. I just got an embargoed press release for a new top-tier gravel racer bike that fits big tires but has a lot of things going on that won't be good, or all that great, for most gravel riders. 

Keep in mind that this flashy, top end stuff is really being driven by a very small percentage of very talented and fit athletes. It is not for most people, although the marketing people will do what marketing people do to get you to believe that it is for you. 

What I see as a benefit from all of this is a wider range of fatter gravel tires in the 45mm - 50mm, and maybe bigger, ranges. We all love tires, and so that part will be embraced. But beware of the weird, super-short wheel base, oddly front position biased, "aero" gravel racing bikes which you are going to see coming soon. They are for very fit, fast, racing folks who are getting paid and put in hours and hours of training to do what they do. That is not most gravel riders. This should not be the gravel equivalent of the "Lance Effect" for gravel bikes, because if that is where this big tire thing takes us, we're in for the demise of gravel riding as we know it. 

One more thing: Many people are not down with bigger tires. They claim that they are slower, heavier, and "feel dead". It is that last bit that bears looking at. 

Trek Checkmate. *Image courtesy of Trek Bicycles)

There is an old adage that goes, "If it feels fast, it IS fast." This is how many people discern speed and why more smooth, comfortable, and often times faster bikes and components are panned as being "slow", dead feeling, and not what fast riders want. 

We went through this when suspended forks for MTB came about. Many riders hated them because they "felt slow" and obviously they were heavier than traditional unicrown steel forks of the day. But when stopwatches kept showing faster times, minds began to change. Nowadays power meters tell the tale, but it has been proven that wider tires have lower rolling resistance and in the case of gravel racers, the tires can lend more comfort, control, and less vibrations to the rider over a long course like Unbound's 200 miles of flinty gravel roads. 

Now mountain bikes still had a lot to figure out when suspension came about, and one of those things was that more travel was necessary. But it could be argued that the finer points of mountain bike suspension are still being refined a full 35 years afterward. Gravel is just getting started down that path. Bigger tires are a part of this. More will happen in the future in this realm. 

We will have to wait and see what that might look like.