Shopping for road bike tyres is easy – if performance is your main concern, there are three basic steps to finding something good.
You go online and look up what the fastest tyres are, search for your chosen model and find a good price, then you click buy. Simple.
There are other variables, of course – such as puncture resistance, grip, weight and so on, but let’s face it – these days, most all-rounder road-racing tyres from recognisable brands are pretty similar.
You can’t really go too far wrong.
Shopping for gravel bike tyres, on the other hand, isn’t so easy.
You can go online and look up what the fastest gravel bike tyres are, of course, but then you'll notice they tend to look a lot like slick road tyres – and you might start to wonder, “Is this a good idea? Won’t I need some tread for grip?”
Luckily for you, I have the answers.
The fastest gravel bike tyre available
If you’ve visited bicyclerollingresistance.com recently – one of the internet’s best sources of bicycle tyre rolling resistance data – you’ll see that Hutchinson’s Caracal Race TLR tyres (£54.99 / €59.99) are listed as the fourth fastest tyre in the CX / Gravel category.
Fourth place might not seem so exciting, but a closer look reveals the three faster tyres aren’t really ‘gravel’ tyres at all – they’re all slicks.
Hutchinson’s Caracal Race TLR, then, is the most efficient gravel tyre with tread of at least 1mm tall on the shoulders.
To find out if that’s enough to make it function as a proper ‘gravel bike tyre’, and not just a glorified road tyre, I’ve been using both this and its tougher (and much slower) sibling, the Caracal TLR, for a while now – and I’ve got some conclusions.
They raise some really interesting questions about how we think about gravel riding, and how we should set up our bikes for it.
Hutchinson Caracal Race TLR mini-review
First of all, yes, the Caracal Race TLRs are really fast gravel tyres – you can feel that immediately.
Where most gravel tyres tend to feel quite draggy on the road, especially if you’re coming off a road bike with lightweight, racy tyres such as Continental GP5000 S TRs, for example.
These, though, don’t feel far off proper road tyres on tarmac, yet they’re capable of floating over broken surfaces, hard-packed dirt roads and less technical gravel trails.
That shouldn’t be a surprise because, according to the lab data, these are faster than 38mm Schwalbe Pro One TLE tyres – which are proper road-racing tyres with a completely slick tread.
- Read more: 4 types of gravel, 2 types of fun
Of course, at around 470g each, these tyres add a decent chunk of weight to your bike compared to the 28s or 30s most of us run on road bikes these days.
And, yes, that is going to make you fractionally slower on the climbs.
However, we’re all grown-up enough to understand that comes with the territory. If you want bigger tyres so you can get more grip and lower rolling resistance off-road, that inevitably means more material and therefore more weight. It’s just how it goes.
Of course, the pro gravel racers now using cross-country mountain bike tyres would doubtless argue many of us would benefit from tyres with even more volume, but that’s an argument for another day.
Are they tough enough?
In terms of puncture resistance, it’s fair to say these tyres – like most at this racy end of the spectrum – aren’t going to be performing miracles.
As a relatively lightweight rider, I’m also a bit easier on kit than many others, and I’ve also been using Tubolight EVO Gravel tyre inserts to guard against pinch flats.
Those caveats aside, though, I didn’t suffer any punctures with these tyres during testing.
Of course, it’s possible I was simply lucky, but nevertheless, if you treat them well, then they’ll hold up OK.
Hutchinson Caracal Race TLR mini-conclusion
If the conditions you’re riding in are suitable, the Caracal Race TLR tyres are fantastic.
They’re as fast as some road tyres, but have enough volume to smooth out rough roads and hardpack gravel trails.
In my experience, at least, they’re also tough enough to make them practical to use – these aren’t paper-thin time trial tyres.
Inevitably, though, there are some trade-offs.
Part of what makes these tyres so fast on the road is the slick central section and minimalist tread on the shoulders, but that can come back to bite you off-road if the conditions get tricky.
When things get loose – or worse, wet and muddy – these tyres simply don’t bite into the trail, and you can run out of grip almost immediately.
There’s also no denying that the 40 and 45mm width options are already starting to feel small by ‘gravel’ standards – if anything, this is more ‘all-road’ territory nowadays.
Given this, I’d love to see Hutchinson release 50 and 55mm-wide versions to compete with the likes of Schwalbe’s excellent G-One RS Pro.
I’d also like to see a version with the same lightweight casing and low-rolling-resistance rubber compound, but with a more aggressive tread pattern to better handle mixed conditions (like the Schwalbe G-One RX Pro).
What kind of gravel tyres should we be using?
And this is where we come to the crux of the issue with gravel tyres.
Is it fair to criticise the Caracal Race for not being good at things it’s not designed to do?
It’s a race tyre rather than an all-rounder by design, so you could argue you'd expect it to trade grip for speed – that’s simply part of the calculation.
The problem is that the term ‘gravel’ encompasses a whole range of different things, and what constitutes a ‘gravel ride’ can be even more varied.
In many parts of the UK, even piecing together every farm track and byway I can find still leaves me with routes totalling at least 50 per cent tarmac roads, and typically far more.
In those scenarios, even if some of the trails are fairly loose or rocky, I don’t want slower, grippier tyres that are going to feel rubbish for the majority of the ride just because they’re ‘perfect’ for the toughest off-road sections.
On the other hand, if you’re gearing up for Unbound Gravel in Kansas – which is almost all off-road – it’s unlikely you’ll be best served by something that’s essentially an extra-large road tyre.
For terrain like that, it’s starting to look like you want a set of cross-country mountain bike tyres (assuming your gravel bike can fit them, of course).
There’s no perfect gravel tyre
The reality is there’s no one tyre that can do everything on a gravel bike in the same way a Continental GP5000 S TR, Vittoria Corsa Pro TLR – or any other equivalent Pirelli, Michelin, Schwalbe, Hutchinson or so on – can do on a road bike.
All else being equal, narrower gravel tyres with less prominent tread tend to be faster on tarmac, because they’re lighter, typically a bit more aerodynamic and you don’t need as much tyre volume to deal with the bumps in the road.
Off-road, though, bigger tyres can be faster because they’re better able to absorb imperfections in the trail, and – if you switch to fast XC mountain bike tyres – can be made with thinner casings that have even lower rolling resistance.
Deciding which way to go, then, really depends on where you’re going to be riding.
If you really care about optimising your gravel bike setup, it could mean changing your tyres every time you ride a substantially different route – or, more likely, being prepared to compromise on something.
In my case, these tyres are a good balance of characteristics for the kind of all-road/gravel riding I do most often.
I’ve definitely had some sketchy moments when using them on wet or loose trails, but for mostly dry days, the trade-off feels well worth it for the abundant speed you get in return.
If you like to stay off the road as much as possible and stray onto technical or rocky gravel trails, though, these aren’t the right tyres for your gravel bike.
Knowing and understanding where you’re riding, and what kind of roads and trails you’re likely to encounter, is the key to finding the best gravel bike tyres for you.
- Read more: These are the gravel bike tyres we would buy with our own cash – and nobody went narrower than 45mm
