DT Swiss GR1600 Spline wheelset review
New, wide, gravel-specific wheels
GBP £495.00 RRP | USD $707.00 | EUR €559.00 Skip to view deals
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When it comes to gravel wheels most of the options seem to be weighted towards the higher end of the market. However, with lots of us looking to buy a gravel bike as a second bike or commuting workhorse, high-end, lightweight carbon wheels aren’t really what we’re looking for.
Thankfully, DT Swiss has a wide range of wheels to suit the adventurous rider and the GR1600 sits firmly mid-range, so this is an upgrade that won’t break the bank.
With an aluminium rim of 25mm x 28mm the wheel is wider than it is deep. The inner width is 24mm so it’s suitable for tyres over 50mm wide!
The wheels are hand-assembled using DT’s hard-wearing and ever-reliable 350 hub internals, which sit inside a fetching silver/grey CNC’d hub shell using DT’s straight-pull Spline design. The hubs look every inch a premium unit.
These wheels are built to be tough and the spoke pattern is the proven two-cross and rated to a max system weight of 130kg, enough for bike, rider and luggage, too.
DT includes plenty of extras in the package with tubeless tape, valves, IS six-bolt adaptors for the rotors, Shimano + SRAM XDR freehubs, 5mm (QR) endcaps and 15mm endcaps (they come as 12mm as standard).
Weight-wise the 790g front and 960g rear (including valves, tape, disc-lock rings and Shimano freehub) make them firmly middleweight. Out on the road and trail, though, they feel both light and responsive without being overly stiff.
With a large volume tyre in place, the wheels worked well in tandem absorbing rough washboard surfaces without bouncing or pinging you off-line, yet not flexing so much as to be detrimental to handling and control. They are a beautifully balanced wheel that’s been put together to a very high standard.
What’s not quite as up to scratch, however, is the tubeless-ready rim tape. It’s on the thin side and, between switching tyres from dry conditions to a more aggressive mud tyre for the winter, I noticed that some of the tape had begun to peel with sealant creeping under the adhesive and a couple of small tears, too, which meant cleaning and replacing the tape with something more substantial. I’d rather add a few grams for reliable sealing than chance it.
- Spline hub: DT Swiss spline hubs use straight pull spokes
- Spokes: The spokes on the GR1600s are DT’s wide aero design
- Rim: The cross-section design is optimised for tubeless tyres
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Product Specifications
Product
| Price | br_price, 5, 3, Price, EUR €559.00GBP £495.00USD $707.00 |
| Weight | br_weight, 5, 6, Weight, 1,750g – including valves, tape, disc-lock rings and Shimano freehub, Array, g |
| Brand | br_brand, 5, 10, Brand, Dt swiss |
Features
| Brake type | br_brakeTypeSimple, 11, 0, Brake type, Disc |
| Freehub | br_freehub, 11, 0, Freehub, Shimano |
| Rim depth | br_rimDepth, 11, 0, Rim depth, 25mm |
| Rim internal width | br_rimInternalWidth, 11, 0, Rim internal width, 24mm |
| Rim material | br_rimMaterial, 11, 0, Rim material, Aluminium |
| Spoke count | br_spokeCountFront, 11, 0, Spoke count, 24 front, 24 rear |
| Spokes | br_spokes, 11, 0, Spokes, Straight pull spokes |
| Tubeless compatibility | br_tubelessCompatibility, 11, 0, Tubeless compatibility, Tubeless compatible |
| Tyre type | br_tyreType, 11, 0, Tyre type, Clincher |
| Wheel size | br_wheelSize, 11, 0, Wheel size, 27.5in/650b |
Authors
Warren Rossiter is BikeRadar and Cycling Plus magazine’s senior technical editor for road and gravel. Having been testing bikes for more than 20 years, Warren has an encyclopedic knowledge of road cycling and has been the mastermind behind our Road Bike of the Year test for more than a decade. He’s also a regular presenter on the BikeRadar Podcast and on BikeRadar’s YouTube channel. In his time as a cycling journalist, Warren has written for Mountain Biking UK, What Mountain Bike, Urban Cyclist, Procycling, Cyclingnews, Total Bike, Total Mountain Bike and T3. Over the years, Warren has written about thousands of bikes and tested more than 2,500 – from budget road bikes to five-figure superbikes. He has covered all the major innovations in cycling this century, and reported from launches, trade shows and industry events in Europe, Asia, Australia, North American and Africa. While Warren loves fast road bikes and the latest gravel bikes, he also believes electric bikes are the future of transport. You’ll regularly find him commuting on an ebike and he longs for the day when everyone else follows suit. You will find snaps of Warren’s daily rides on the Instagram account of our sister publication, Cycling Plus (@cyclingplus).
