Rediscovered cycling through gravelbikes and fell pretty hard in love with it again 🙂
I am preparing for quite long ride with my friend (400+km…long at least for me) and I was wondering which tires on my rims would give me some advantage when it comes down to riding on tarmac/aspahlt.
I am not planning on having a second set of rims, I would just swap the tyre in advance of this ride and then probably go back to my knobbly-beefy tires.
I am riding a Focus Atlas 6.8, the tires are WTB riddlers. Bonus info; I am a rather heavy rider.
Does anyone have
1. a recommendation for „faster“ but grippy tire?
2. would a wheel/rim change give me a lot of benefits?
Thank you for your help!
by malficiousd
4 Comments
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A wheel change would be a larger investment and also there aren’t too many wheelsets to choose from when it comes to the atlas. It road boost standard never really took off. But personally I can recommend continental ultra sport 3 as a budget tire. It’s not tubeless but it’s surprisingly fast and quite grippy on pavement. I also never had a puncture since I put them on about 500km ago.
I haven’t ridden on riders but knobbies usually feel worse and over 400km that sure adds up. I’m a fan of Continental road tires. I usually run GP 4 seasons on the bike I use for gravel. Most of my mileage is still pavement. I’m trying out some Gravel King slicks right now, but the wet grip is noticably worse to me so far. A certain infant is distracting me from getting much testing in though.
Tires are a lot of voodoo/marketing/placebo. So don’t worry, you’ll be totally fine with the Riddlers on Tarmac. They may not be the fastest but are very reliable and a relatively puncture resistant. When you are doing 400 km it’s really not about +/- 1 km/h in speed. Just ride your bike and enjoy.