While Geoff Kabush has mentioned liking them on his way to winning at Bonelli Park earlier this year, we hadn’t yet seen the (presumably forthcoming) Maxxis Pace XC mountain bike tires yet.
Thanks to some snooping at a regional NC event and area trailheads, we spotted what’s presumably their next cross country race tread. Using a knob pattern similar to the Ikon, the Pace does change the shape of the knobs quite a bit and adds more pronounced reinforcing ribs to connect them. Knob height is very low, only a few millimeters, growing slightly taller toward the edges. Small nubs between the blocks should help a bit on dryer days.
The sidewalls introduce a new, tougher looking pattern. Perhaps it’s an update to their Exogrid, or perhaps it’s just cosmetic. Hopefully we’ll know more at Eurobike. In the meantime, click through to see a possible update to the Ardent trail tire…
The Maxxis Ardent is a very popular tread, offering fast rolling and great all around grip. This version was simply marked as prototype, but the tread pattern is almost identical to the current Ardent. The only difference we could spot was the alternating “L” shape to every other middle knob. Current versions’ transition knobs are all shaped like the non-L ones. Rumor has it they’ll also be increasing the tubeless ready options to include 29×2.4 sizes on this model.
