This cross-country tire review started with a story about gravel tires. A few months ago, Ronan Mc Laughlin wrote a piece with Escape Collective member John Karrasch that dove into rolling resistance numbers from a number of wide gravel tires — wide enough that what we were really talking about were mountain bike tires.
Two tires stood out to me in that story: the Maxxis Aspen, which I have used extensively and have many (mostly positive) opinions on, and the Vittoria Peyote, which I’d never ridden but tested very well in John’s rolling resistance testing, suggesting it’s quite fast. Both were tested in a 2.4” size.
Rolling resistance is all well and good, but I had bigger questions. XC is not gravel. There are more corners in 2 km of my local trails than in the 200 miles of Unbound. So do the Peyotes turn? Do they stop? Do they keep air inside them? All key attributes of a mountain bike tire. More importantly, could they knock the Aspen off the top step of my nearly-semi-slick XC race tire podium?
This is a test of Maxxis vs. Vittoria racing XC tires in the real world. Fight!
Maxxis Aspen vs. Vittoria Peyote: Which XC MTB Tire is Faster?
Both the Aspen and Peyote aren't quite semi-slicks, but they're close. Let's call them nearly-slicks. They have very little center tread and decent side (or cornering) knobs. They're specialist tires in multiple ways.
For the purposes of real-world testing, I wanted to test them both as pairs and in a setup closer to what I might actually race. For that, I matched them with their more capable (but still race-worthy) siblings, the Mezcal from Vittoria and the Rekon Race from Maxxis, mix-and-matching the four tires in various combinations to find the fastest and most reliable.
I tried the Peyote and Aspen on front and rear as well as these mixed setups, using the Mezcal and Rekon Race as front tires and the Peyote and Aspen as rear tires. I like mixed setups; rear tires skittering around is fine, but I tend to want a bit more grab on the front.
Both the Vittoria tires use the company's Race 60 tpi casing (the more race-oriented option), and the Maxxis options were in a 120 tpi EXO casing. I tested all these options across the first three months of our local MTB season. I spent most of this time on various combinations of Vittoria, since I've been riding the Aspen for more than a decade and the Rekon Race for a few years now. I already know them well.
First, some real widths and weights. All measurements taken on a pair of Mavic Crossmax SL wheels with 30 mm internal width, and after the tires had a chance to stretch out (width increased by as much as 3 mm in the case of the Aspen after sitting inflated for 36 hours).
Vittoria Mezcal 2.4 Race
The narrowest of the four but an impressive weight given it also has the largest tread blocks.
Width: 2.34” / 59.37 mm
Weight: 757 g
Vittoria Peyote 2.4 Race
Wider, nearly a true 2.4, and a bit lighter than the Mezcal.
Width: 2.38” / 60.40 mm
Weight: 751 g
Maxxis Rekon Race 2.4 120 tpi
Heaviest of the four, but not by much.
Width: 2.41” / 61.28 mm
Weight: 792 g
Maxxis Aspen 2.4 120 tpi
Lightest and widest of the four, but only by a few grams. I've weighed a lot of Aspens over the years and, like most tires, they can vary by as much as 15 grams. So in other real world Aspen and Peyote are the same weight.
Width: 2.42" / 61.46 mm
Weight: 747 g
And then the rolling resistance data that initially caught my eye. No rolling resistance testing is perfect, of course, and actual performance will depend massively on the surface you're riding. All I really care about is that both the Aspen and Peyote test pretty fast. Beyond that, I care more about how they actually ride.
On-trail testing
None of these options are mud tires. These are for hardpack and loose-over-hard conditions, specifically in an XC racing context. That’s where I tested them.
Our local trails are dry with varying levels of loose dust and rocks most of the year. They're rocky, dusty, and baked by the sun. Traction decreases as the summer wears on and things get drier and dustier. In other words, they're exactly the sort of terrain both the Aspen and Peyote are designed to be raced on.
While the primary goal of this review was to compare the Aspen vs the Peyote, realistically neither of them are very good front tires. Why? If your rear tire breaks loose, you’ll probably be fine; if your front breaks loose, you’re going down. Sounds obvious, but it’s the primary reality around which XC tire selection should be made.
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Given this, I tested each of the nearly-slicks with their burlier siblings:
- Front and rear Aspen (very scary)
- Front Rekon Race + rear Aspen (very good)
- Front and rear Peyote (mostly scary)
- Front Mezcal, rear Peyote (fine)
- Front Rekon Race, rear Peyote (very very good)
In each configuration, I ran an XC-weight insert in the rear tire and no insert in the front.
I played around with pressure across all setups, as I do regularly, depending on trail conditions. At my weight (roughly 150-155 lbs /70 kg + 25 lbs / 11 kg of bike), most pressure calculators suggest something in the 15-19 psi range, and that tends to be where my personal preferences lie as well.
Because I was running an insert in the rear tire, I was able to drop pressure until I started getting sidewall folding in hard corners. That ended up being about 18 psi for the Aspen and 18.5 for the Peyote, possibly because of the taller profile on the Peyote. On the front, I stuck to 15-16 psi, depending on conditions and the trail I was riding.
If you're only looking at rolling resistance, consistent pressure across tests is important. But my goal was to optimize each tire setup, which meant I wasn't going to test everything at one pre-set PSI. I played with each tire and its pressure to find the range where it worked best with my weight and riding style.
And the winners are…
I wasn’t planning to mix brands, but after riding everything in various configurations, combining the front Rekon Race and rear Peyote made the most sense. So I tried it, and it was excellent. It’s the clear winner if you can stand having two different brands of tires. I'll explain why.
Did we do a good job with this story?
