Over the weekend, Bielsko-Biała served up some wet and wild World Cup mountain bike racing, and one tire came out on top—an unreleased Schwalbe Dirty Dan Gravity Pro tire raced to two elite wins by both Tahnee Seagrave and Loic Bruni. With snow, rain, and a lot of slippery mud on the Polish DH track, riders from several teams were reaching for this new tire. Dirty Dan has been in the Schwalbe downhill line-up for more than 15 years as a tall, spiky mud tire, but now it looks like it’s ready for a Radial update, together with Tacky Chan too, it seems.
Prototype Schwalbe Dirty Dan tire gets Radial construction?
It’s really not that surprising to see Schwalbe’s excellent new Radial construction shine on the toughest World Cup DH stage. With its more radial (as opposed to conventional 90° bias-ply) construction, these new tires flex more locally than a conventional tire with the same pressure. That gives them an almost magic combination of more grip, a larger contact patch, and the ability to run higher pressures so as not to need tire inserts.
Of course, that construction update was going to come to other Schwalbe gravity tires. So it was no shock to see Elite Women’s winner Tahnee Seagrave (on a prototype Orbea DH bike no less) racing a set of tires clearly labeled as Schwalbe Dirty Dan Gravity Pro – the newest, simplified nomenclature for Schwalbe’s top tech downhill tires.
What was a bit more surprising here was to see Loic Bruni win just 2 hours later, on what appears to be the same tires. The surprise is that Bruni’s factory Specialized Gravity team typically races its own bike sponsor’s tires. And we spotted the team riding some Specialized tires during practice runs.
But every time I saw Bruni on the track, he was riding a set of the Schwalbes with blacked-out logos. In fact, his tires still had the older style Schwalbe graphics and quite obviously their typical First Ride prototype labels. I would describe the logos as hastily blacked-out with a sharpie. But in all fairness to Bruni’s mechanics, they had to completely scrub the bikes and tires after every test run, so likely the Sharpie just kept wearing off. And the tires he rode in the final race run were better disguised again.
So what’s actually new in these unreleased Schwalbe Dirty Dan Radials?
The most obvious new feature where we could see was the simplified Schwalbe graphics as first introduced on their recent gravel tire update. Besides the new logotype and geometric new swallow logo, Schwalbe is trying to simplify what they print on the side of their tires.
As to the tread itself, it’s a little tricky to be sure since the Dirty Dan already seems to have 2 variants with the same name – 1 lighter, narrower trail (Super Race) version features shorter blocky knobs… and 1 heavier, wider gravity (Super Downhill) version features taller spikier knobs and interspersed Curveclaw knobs between every other shoulder knob for extra off-camber grip.
But it does look like this new Schwalbe Dirty Dan Gravity Pro Radial tread is not quite as tall and spiky as the previous version. The tread layout is the same, but the blocks appear shorter and less tapered. And especially the Curveclaws are there, just much shorter (and likely less flexible) than on the current Dan.
Curveclaws or None?
That could be due simply to the fact that Schwalbe just introduced the all-new front- & rear-specific Shredda treads when Radial construction debuted last year. The Shredda Front was very similar to the old Dan, just built more burly. Now this new prototype Dirty Dan Gravity Pro radial tire looks to be more versatile with more substantial knobs similar to the SHredda, but not so tall.
The new Dirty Dans were often hard to spot at the rainy & muddy Polish DH World Cup, especially since many were being raced with blacked-out logos by teams with other tire sponsors. But we still managed to find several different variants.
The one above on EU-champ Lisa Baumann’s Commencal Supreme has no visible sipes cut into each tread block. But it does has the smaller Curveclaws.
This tire – belonging to one of the Rogue Racing – SR Suntour riders – features the new Schwalbe graphics with a blank white space for testing notes in place of the ‘Gravity Pro’ label. And most curiously, it does not have the extra Curveclaws between its shoulder knobs.
I wonder if it might be a lighter Trail casing or narrower 2.0″ width, like we saw with the previous Super Race tire? Or perhaps it was just another experiment?
Sipes or Smooth Knobs?
We caught up with a clean set of both prototype tires in one of the Schwalbe-sponsored team’s paddock to get a closer look. Here we can see the siped or non-siped tread block variants. And you can also see that the new Schwalbe Dirty Dan Gravity Pro tires now feature tread blocks not much taller than the Tacky Chan tire in the background.
While in the pits we also picked up a few radial rumors about why this unreleased tire was so highly in demand. It sounded like all but official confirmation that these new tires do feature Radial construction hidden inside. Team mechanics did confirm that they no longer need tire inserts when racing on these tires. It was hinted that we could probably confirm which teams were using the new Radial tires exclusively, as they probably don’t have tire insert sponsors any longer!
We were also led to believe that the actual angle of the tires inner fabric is already different from what we’ve seen with the Albert, Magic Mary & Shredda. And we’ve been told to expect a lot more new gravity tire development from Schwalbe.
Schwalbe Tacky Chan & More New Radials coming soon?
The most obvious assumption we could make from that is to expect an updated Tacky Chan, too. In addition to that previous Tacky Chan hiding behind the new Schwalbe Dirty Dan Radials, we saw more than one other team with this popular DH tire developed with Amaury Pierron a few years back.
But we also spotted this unknown prototype tire above. It looks to feature the same siped shoulder knobs of the new Albert, paired with boxy pairs of siped center lugs similar to those of these new Dirty Dans. Could it be something like a less aggressive Shredda for drier loam? Or a more aggressive Albert for when the hardpack gets wet too?
I guess there might be a bunch of new Schwalbe Gravity & Trail Radial mountain bike tires in the works. And we’ll have our work cut out for us staying on top of them all!
