Continental Revamps Its Entire Tyre Line

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Family photo

Things have been pretty quiet from Continental Tyres for the last couple of years. The company has been busy with some dull corporate move arounds and logo redesigns, the revamping of its head office and perhaps it’s been sat around waiting for rim and tyre widths to settle down too.

A new tread for last year, the Mountain King shared tread with an Adidas trail shoe.

So, now it’s back with a completely new take on its most popular designs. The tyres now all carry a suggested rim width on the sidewall, and the tyre sizes themselves have been changed to better reflect the actual width, rather than some seemingly random number.

 

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Wide and clear ‘V’ tread on the Mountain King. Farmer John anyone?

Goldilocks plus tyres.
It seems that the whole plus-size thing seems to be settling down, with many companies deciding that 2.6in is a good compromise between weight and cushioning. The brand new 2.6in Baron is designed for 30-25mm internal rim widths.

Big, chunky 2.6in tyres are coming…
Loads of mud room there.

The new 2.6in (by 27.5…) Baron will also be joined by 2.6in versions of the Trail King, Mountain King and Cross King, so Conti must see a future in this width.

The Cross King itself has had its XC-race-ready tread design nipped and tucked too. With a slightly narrower width now, the tread has been tightened to allow for smoother rolling on hardpack and a more predictable behaviour, as you can see in this diagram.

Still recognisable, but more purposeful-looking
All treads have had some massaging and some weight reduction too.
These older designs are disappearing soon.
The recommended rim width – in this case 21-25mm. About right for a 2.2in race tyre.

All of these new designs should start appearing around May time.

Chipps Chippendale

Singletrackworld's Editor At Large

With 22 years as Editor of Singletrack World Magazine, Chipps is the longest-running mountain bike magazine editor in the world. He started in the bike trade in 1990 and became a full time mountain bike journalist at the start of 1994. Over the last 30 years as a bike writer and photographer, he has seen mountain bike culture flourish, strengthen and diversify and bike technology go from rigid steel frames to fully suspended carbon fibre (and sometimes back to rigid steel as well.)

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