Continental Tyres Compound Equivalence

I’m thinking of trying Conti’s on my Rail, does anyone have any idea what the Endurance compound is equivalent to in Maxxis and/or Schwalbe?

IMO this is harder than it sounds, conti rubber tends to be a bit cleverer than most rather than just depending on softness. Full of carbon black and silica and physics and whotnot.

I have an argotal soft and a kryptotal endurance. They feel and seem harder than the descriptions make out, but when riding somehow grip like they’re softer than they are, while still rolling like a harder tyre, if that makes sense?

The argotal especially surprised me, when I first took it out of the box I thought “this is obviously going to be too hard for the job, this is not a soft compound”, felt like a harder rubber than maxxterra. But I tried it anyway and in practice it’s usefully stickier than maxxterra, while still rolling like a harder tyre. The tread is very good and that definitely helps but even on hard stuff it grips better than I expected, it’s a good trick. Closer to maxxterra than maxxgrip for sure though, it does really well for what it is but it’s not got that SUPER GRIP that you sometimes want in january. Equally I wouldn’t want to pedal a maxxgrip tyre this spiky around a trailcentre so it’s fair enough

The Endurance was less obvious but it had a 2015 OEM-ish feel out of the box, bit plasticky, frankly it felt a bit shit but again it rides stickier than it is. This is a wee bit harder to pin down, because I’m comparing it to the dhr2 in maxxterra and in dual, and frankly the dhr2 is a much better tyre and totally flatters the rubber. The endurance kryptotal re has a decent amount of baseline grip I think, but it doesn’t use it anything like as well, spits traction more, slides more abruptly in a way that makes me think “hard rubber” even if it’s maybe actually because of the tread… so the whole big picture is that it feels less grippy, less “usefully” grippy than it probably actually is, while IMO any dhr2 feels grippier than it actually is. But my best impression is that it’s somewhere between dual and maxxterra, but rolls pretty much like dual. I reckon the rubber’s pretty good tbh as a balance of speed and grip but the tyre’s not that great.

I love the Argotal soft, it’s excellent. I tolerate the kryptotal endurance as a rear. Afraid I don’t have any experience of Endurance on the front and based on these tyres I never will, I think the Soft is fast enough to make it pointless to go harder for me (I want an ultrasoft enduro! Come on conti, we know they’re coming…) Oh yeah, you didn’t ask but I’m quite impressed with the Trail casing, it’s not supertough but it does well for a kilo-ish tyre, I’ve had one flat and did feel like,well, maybe that was my fault. Better than Exo IMO. Fundamentally I want a Trail Endurance DHR2 😉 And probably a Enduro Soft DHR2!

My basic feeling would be, if in any doubt err on the side of softer- but that this is OK because the soft rolls well.