Mountain bike tyres have become a hot topic in gravel racing. With more top pros opting for MTB tyres in gravel races, the debate has exploded across headlines and social media. As is often the case, though, the discussion tends to oversimplify things, lacking the nuance needed to truly understand the trade-offs.
Are MTB tyres actually faster on gravel? If so, which ones, and on what kind of terrain? While lab-based drum testing offers useful insights and while we’ve always assumed those tyre rankings carry across to the real world – even if the exact deltas may vary – the MTB-tyres-are-faster claims suggest those results don’t always reflect real-world performance, in particular on soft surfaces of varying degrees of roughness. That raises a critical question: how do we determine the fastest tyre for gravel?
These are exactly the questions John Karrasch set out to answer. A bike fitter by trade, Karrasch is also a physiotherapist and coach. More recently, he has taken on the role of tyre tester. Using the Chung Method, previously discussed on Performance Process with its creator, Robert Chung, he has been conducting extensive field testing to find real-world answers to gravel tyre questions.
Karrasch is also an Escape Collective member, frequently contributing to performance-focused discussions in the Escape Collective members-only Discord. Today, he joins us on Performance Process to break down his tyre testing, methodology, and results. His testing has produced some of the first independent, real-world results on the MTB-tyres-for-gravel trend, while they’re far from definitive, they suggest wide tyres might be fastest, and on more than just rough surfaces.
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