INTRODUCTION
Gravel bikes are appearing on mountain bike trails all over the country – it’s time to shave our legs, pull on a tattoo sleeve and find out what all the fuss is about
Until very recently, gravel was something you shovelled onto the driveway. Now though – in case you’ve been burying your head in a pile of it recently – it’s a kind of riding. One that blurs the lines between XC mountain biking, cyclo-cross, and road riding. To their proponents (and they now include once mtb-only stalwarts like Evil and most recently, YT Industries) gravel bikes deliver the kind of speed-over-the-ground thrills of a road bike, but on natural terrain and flowy singletrack. To their detractors, they are road bikes out of their element and the best way to spoil a good mountain bike ride.
So who has it right? Time for mbr to step in and deliver a verdict on gravel riding… totally unbiased, of course. You can completely disregard the fact that we’re a mountain bike magazine.
GRAVEL’S HIGH GROUND
Let’s get serious for a moment though, and consider whether there actually could be some advantages to riding gravel bikes on certain trails. We often hear how mountain bikes are so good now they dumb down trails that were once difficult or exciting. Could gravel bikes fill that space, delivering an even faster and more thrilling ride than the best XC bikes, covering more ground and with less effort?
Bike companies are smart too, it’s not a coincidence that gravel bikes now have lots of the components that make mountain bikes great. Suspension, disc brakes, squidgy tyres. We’ll get to that next, but we wouldn’t be surprised if the gap between the two disciplines was smaller than we first thought.
Gravel riding is also one of the biggest growth markets for bike sales in Europe. Bucking the trend of declining sales following the post-Covid slowdown, gravel bike volumes were up 8% in 2022 from the previous year, according to the Bicycle Association. And they’re up a huge 59% since 2019. This prompts the question: is there something we’re missing out on?
THE BIKES
Step forward two bikes from Specialized, designed to cover ground as quickly as possible but with slightly different ways of going about it.
Both use a full carbon frame, but the Diverge STR Expert has something Spesh calls Future Shock, delivering 30mm of rear travel and 30mm on the front. Suspension then, but nothing like on a mountain bike, where the wheels are suspended from the frame – here it’s the seatpost that moves, meaning you’ll only get the rear-wheel advantage when sat on the saddle.
The Epic Hardtail Comp meanwhile has a normal suspension fork in the
