The first of the Road Plus tires and the one to launch the concept for WTB. Just about nobody believed in the concept and it had many things it had to accomplish—had to lure road riders into considering the idea, had to ride very smoothly on road to prove its claimed benefits, had to maintain some lateral traction in dirt to prove its versatility, couldn’t fall apart, couldn’t be heavy, had to work well tubeless, needed to be as compatible as possible within the existing landscape. Not easy. Fortunately, it worked out and we were far too fortunate that Sean Walling and Rick Hunter agreed (months in advance with no physical samples) to launch it under beautiful frames they built by hand for NAHBS 2016, breathing life into the concept. It went on to win a standard Eurobike award, a Eurobike Gold award and quickly ranked as a top seller for WTB.

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This was the second Road Plus pattern for WTB. It had to pick up where the Horizon left off and start to paint a picture of the intended usage roadmap for Road Plus. The Byway brought a little sprinkling of tread to the equation—not too much, mind you—and showed that hunting for dirt with a drop bar, all-day broken pavement type bike was ok, and beyond that, it was intended. This tire almost mirrors the Exposure 34’s pattern, and we had to have it ready to go if the Horizon and Road Plus took off—a little challenging due to human-resource management when working on an unproven tire-size concept. But, Road Plus took off and the Byway went on to outsell the Horizon because it was the type of pattern people wanted in the first place, they just needed the Horizon to know the concept made sense.

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The Riddler 37 was the safest bet within WTB’s initial drop-bar lineup. If the Horizon Road Plus was the biggest gamble, the Exposure 30 the biggest stray from WTB’s mountain branding, the Riddler 37 was the closest thing to a sure bet. Longtime WTB athlete and good guy Nathan Riddle had designed the Riddler mountain tire with WTB’s product team, the drop bar version toned down the hungrier mountain version and we worked hard to ensure there was appropriate transition and height to the intermediate knobs before the huge cornering blocks. At 37mm, it was the sweet spot for gravel in 2016 and was launched at Trans Iowa v12 after being unveiled at Sea Otter. The casing came out really nice, so it had a remarkably smooth ride for (only) 37mm of volume.

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This was the big, rad rambunctious brother of the reasonable and sensible Riddler 37. When it was worked on in 2015, there weren’t many people riding 29 x 2.0 drop bar rigs, so a 45mm dirt-going, quick, happy-to-corner tire was right on the edge of clearance for a lot of bikes—it happily fit within the steel rad-touring types, then eventually carbon bikes caught up too, a few could already fit it. Fast, big and fun.

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The Exposure 30 was the biggest departure from WTB’s dirt-brand identity. It was designed to be a high-end endurance road tire. Tubeless, no inexpensive variants—only the finest materials, the nicest tire the factory could make. It was intended to target the too gnarly to be just contained by pavement types allowing for the volume of 30mm to connect road climbs and rides by smoother dirt. The factory didn’t like doing this tire because the casing was so high end and infrequently used, but they rode very smoothly and came out right when road bikes were finally accepting disc brakes and tubeless.

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The Exposure 32 came out after the Exposure 30 and 34, so it needed to fill in usage between the smooth 30 and the mixed, hint-of-a-knob-here-and-there 34. Standing back now looking at the Exposure family of tires, the 32’s the one that makes the most sense—no knob bump to feel regardless of how far leaned over on road, a somewhat relieved diamond-like outer pattern for a touch more grip in dirt. It filled things out nicely and made the Exposure pattern make sense—it’s always hard when you can’t do everything at once because you have to plant flags down, almost like story poles on a house remodel, then keep building toward that bigger picture. The 32 finished the Exposure picture.

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The Exposure 34 was meant to be right at the mixing point between endurance road and gravel. And yes, it may sound like those two disciplines are one and the same, but the Exposure 34 used the same very high-end casing as the Exposure 30 and then went with a tread design that spoke to handling some dirt, and the 34 width was (in 2016) right at the max of endurance road and where people wondered if fast gravel was happening. The first article samples showed up at our Taipei Cycle 2016 booth, were displayed, then went on my bike and I toured around lower Taiwan then up and over Taroko Gorge from the east side back to Taichung, sleeping in local parks, beaches, and under a pagoda. James Olsen of Evans Cycles got the Horizon Road Plus tire samples even though I wanted them because I’m sometimes a nice guy and James was potentially an OEM customer. We battled the craziest cold rain and zero-visibility freezing fog the second to last day going from the hot and humid jungle on the Pacific to Wuling Pass at over 11,000 feet. A zero-tire-issue tour on those first article samples.

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The Resolute was the last tire I worked on with WTB and is probably my favorite. It came to be for slightly selfish reasons—I was infatuated with Trans Iowa, which occurred in the spring like most Midwestern gravel events. You never knew what you were going to get with Trans Iowa—it could be torrential rain and soul-sucking clay mud. It could be hot, dry, fast, and windy. You didn’t even know the route until race day, it was the ultimate roll of the dice. So in musing it over, I really thought there needed to be a tire that could address that anything nature of gravel—an actual distance tire capable of varying conditions. The design team didn’t like the foolishness of the request: it had to clear muck, it couldn’t squirm at all on hard surfaces, it had to be pretty light, really had to ride fast. They kept telling me to pick two design parameters for tread pattern and I always chose the contradicting ones, they all but hated me. In the end, Mark Slate and Evan Smith worked tire design magic and at what had felt like an impasse, an awesome pattern surfaced. Two journalists who I knew wouldn’t lie about it and review a lot of gravel tires said it’s a really good tire. That meant the world. The Resolute almost (but didn’t) replaced the Nano 40, which was the first tire I was lucky enough to work on so it acts as a bookend—from the Nano 40 to Resolute, I really enjoyed working on tires at WTB.

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