Hunt reveals 5AM Gravel Limitless wheels with huge, 45mm-wide front rim and carbon spokes

Hunt has announced its latest flagship aero gravel wheels, the 5AM Gravel Limitless, claiming they’re lighter and more aerodynamic than almost anything else available.

As with the British brand’s 5AM Limitless road wheels, which launched earlier this year, the 5AM Gravel Limitless wheels use an ‘aero mullet’ rim pairing.

This sees a deeper, wider front rim paired with a shallower and narrower rear rim, designed to offer the best balance of aerodynamic performance and low weight (a design pioneered by Specialized and its Roval Rapide CLX III wheels).

Thanks to the use of the brand's patented Limitless technology, Hunt has pushed this to the extreme with an enormous 45mm external width on the front rim, while maintaining a 27mm internal width for improved tyre compatibility.

Available now with steel or ceramic bearings, the Hunt 5AM Gravel Limitless wheels cost £1,999 / $2,399 / €2,399 with steel spokes, or from £2,449 / $2,899 / €2,899 with carbon spokes.

Wide and light

2026 has seen gravel racing finally go ‘aero’ en masse. There seem to be two distinct approaches to the ‘problem’ of gravel performance forming, though.

Many brands, for example, have gone all-in on low drag. We’ve seen new hyper-aero gravel bikes, such as the Argon 18 Anti Matter, Ridley Kanzo Fast 2.0 and Factor Elara, taking gravel racing by storm, alongside ultra-deep gravel wheelsets such as the Newmen Streem G.62s, ENVE G SES 6.7 Pros and Black Inc Sixty Fours.

The Hunt 5AM Gravel Limitless wheels, however, take a more balanced approach, prioritising both aerodynamic efficiency and low weight, rather than low drag above all else.

In this respect, it's a wheelset more in line with Specialized’s new Crux 5 gravel bike and its Roval Terra Aero CLX wheels, or Giant’s Revolt Advanced SL 0 and its carbon-spoked Cadex MAX GXR wheels.

As for why Hunt chose this path, design engineer Patrick Brown told BikeRadar: “For top level pros, that aero [performance] is really important, but for technical gravel – where there are lots of accelerations – weight and feel matters.”

We’ll cover Hunt’s wind-tunnel testing results shortly, but the 5AM Gravel Limitless wheels tipped our the scales at impressively low figures – only 1,340g for the carbon-spoked version and 1,480g with steel spokes (both with rim tape, but without valves).

Specialized claims its Roval Terra Aero CLX wheels also weigh 1,340g, while Cadex’s Max GXR wheels are claimed to weigh as little as 1,280g (without tape or valves).

Both wheelsets are considerably more expensive, however, at £2,998 / $3,399.98 / €3,458 and £3,499 / $4,000 / €3,799, respectively.

Despite this low weight, the Hunt rims are notably wide – 54mm deep / 45mm wide up front, and 49mm deep / 38mm wide out back, both with 27mm internal widths.

In comparison, the Roval rims are 50 / 45mm deep front and rear, and ‘only’ 38.5mm wide, while the Cadex rims are 50mm deep and 35mm wide, front and rear.

As with Hunt’s previous ‘Limitless’ wheelsets, the 5AM Gravel Limitless rims are distinct in their super-wide rim beads, which are 9mm wide on the front rim and 5.5mm wide on the rear.

Hunt says this design helps strengthen the rims and reduces the chances of pinch flats, while the patented construction technology (which sees low-density polymer used in place of carbon fibre to reduce weight) helps reduce rim weight without sacrificing width.

As is increasingly common on carbon gravel wheels, the rims are also hookless or ‘Tubeless Straight Side’ (as opposed to ‘hooked’ or ‘Tubeless Crochet’).

Hunt 5AM Gravel Limitless wind-tunnel results

In terms of that aerodynamic performance, Hunt says it can point to testing done at both the GST wind tunnel in Germany and at the Silverstone Sports Engineering Hub here in the UK.

Hunt says it designed the 5AM Gravel Limitless wheelset around 50mm tyres, because that’s what elite racers are using in the Lifetime Grand Prix (the US gravel scene’s premier off-road bike racing series).

After developing and testing prototypes in CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) and at the GST wind tunnel, Hunt says it tested the final wheelsets against a broad range of competitor options at the Silverstone wind tunnel using a Specialized Crux 5 as the test rig.

Hunt selected an “average wind speed of 11.3kph, and a bike speed of 40kph”, because that’s slightly faster than the average speed of races such as the 2025 edition of Unbound Gravel 200 (which was won at an average speed of 37.8kph).

With 50mm tyres (Vittoria’s T30 gravel tyres), Hunt’s results show the 5AM Gravel Limitless Ti_UD carbon-spoked wheels as the lowest-drag option (by only 0.21 watts compared to Reserve’s 48|53 GR wheels – which it notes is within the margin of error for the tunnel), saving just over 13 watts compared to its 4 Season Gravel alloy wheelset.

The results follow a similar pattern with smaller, 45mm tyres, although overall drag figures reduce accordingly alongside the tyre’s frontal area.

Further testing with 2.1in VIttoria Peyote cross-country mountain bike tyres also shows the 5AM Gravel Limitless coming out on top, although again, only by small amounts.

Brown also noted that, while recent wind-tunnel testing performed by our friends over at CyclingNews showed Hunt’s new wheels can be beaten by ENVE and Newmen’s latest options, both wheelsets use considerably deeper rims and weigh around 200g more.

The Newmen Streem G.62s and ENVE G SES 6.7 Pros, for example, use 62 and 60/67mm-deep rims, and weigh 1,539g (actual weight, including valves) and 1,580g (claimed), respectively.

He also hinted Hunt might look at developing a super-deep version of its Gravel Limitless wheels in the future.