With fat tyres and aero designs becoming commonplace in gravel, it’s clear that the boundaries of the genre are being pushed. Scribe’s new Gravel Ultra wheelset is one of those products that aim to boost performance, with an aero design, a wide profile for fat-tyre support, and string spokes, if that’s your flavour.
It’s no secret that gravel’s roadie roots are taking more of a hold on the genre’s progression, with aero socks now being worn amongst pelotons and aero bike shapes being included on a bunch of new bikes this year. The same goes for Scribe’s latest Gravel Ultra wheelset.
However, the brand says that these wheels, despite coming with a 46mm rim depth, are built for both racing and big, fun days out on the hills. That’s as well as “real-world gravel performance”.
As part of Scribe’s Ultra range, these wheels benefit from a posh T1000 and T1100 carbon fibre construction, which is said to help achieve an overall weight of as little as 1,258g. The construction also uses T700 and T900 fibres to add a hint of compliance and strength. With that, the wheels come sorted with 30mm internal widths, which the brand says supports tyre widths from 35 up to 50mm, so they’re ready to accommodate the incoming slew of fat gravel rubber.
If that’s not enough to get you interested, the wheelset comes with a built-in Outrider pressure monitoring system. It promises +/- 0.7% accuracy and allows riders to track their tyre pressures in real time. Whether or not that’s actually useful to the average rider is another question altogether.
As for the hubs, the Gravel Ultra wheelset comes with ceramic bearings all around and uses a 45-tooth ratchet freehub.
Scribe’s Gravel Ultra wheelset is available in two builds, one with Alpina Ultralite Aero Stainless Steel spokes, which cost £999 and promise to weigh 1,390g. The other is sorted with Berd’s Polymer spokes with Sapim secure lock alloy nipples. This wheelset will set you back £1,449, and it’s poised to weigh 1,258g.
Both wheelsets can be picked up with HG, XDR, Microspline, and N3W freehubs.
1 thought on “Scribe’s new Gravel Ultra wheelset “improves performance in every area” and gets built-in pressure sensor”
I didn’t ride them but if the build quality is any good, that’s a REALLY competitive price, considering the weight. Just think about where things stood only 3 years ago, price/weightwise.
You’d have to be a very strong rider to achieve the sort of speeds on gravel where aero advantages start to have a real world impact but at least these offer the advantage of being very lightweight. Most ‘aero’ wheelsets bring only one effective ‘performance’ to the table: increased sensitivity to sidewind.