Maxxis Ravager Folding Tyre

The Maxxis Ravager is essentially a 700C mountain bike tyre for your gravel bike. It looks very very much like a scaled-down version of the Maxxis Minion SS MTB tyre and you can treat it very much as such, allowing you to take your gravel bike to places other slender treaded bikes might shy away from.

People's interpretation of gravel varies enormously. While for some it's cruising along nicely graded paths, grass-down-the-middle roads and the odd bridleway, for others it's taking a skinnier tyred drop-barred bike everywhere and anywhere they fancy off-road, and frequently somewhere that might patently be more suited to a fatter-tyred and flat-barred mountain bike because it's fun to be skipping along the edge of stupidity on an inappropriate bike. The Maxxis Ravager definitely veers towards the latter use.

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As you might expect from looking at the tread pattern, these tyres are designed for more off-road duties than on, and are a little draggy on tarmac compared with many gravel tyres that typically have a slicker centre tread. That doesn't mean they're noticeably sluggish, though.

That's the payback for their more tufty tufty play dirt manners. The centre knobs do a great job of providing grip in drier soil and damp loam but are still tightly packed enough that the tyres will gum up with sticky mud if you're piloting through well-hydrated gravel.

The more aggressive side knobs do dig in marvellously and save any slide that might result from too-deep dirt or from you getting over-excited, so you can rely on them to keep you straight-ish.

The tyre size of 40mm is on the skinnier side for a modern gravel bike (but a comfy dream if you're used to old school 32mm cyclo-cross tyres). But then a slimmer tyre does offer better frame clearance, which could come in useful if you're heading into the stickier and muddier terrain that the Ravager isn't too bothered by.

The Ravager comes with a 60tpi (threads per inch) sidewall casing, which doesn't make them the most supple tyre around, although it does play well to their rugged strengths, making them more resistant to rock and root thumps and able to shrug off impacts that more delicate sidewalls would crumple over.

With a suggested range of 35-60psi, it's advisable to run them as low as you dare according to your weight, riding style and terrain to get them to perform at their most combative, much as you might a mountain bike tyre.

With that in mind, it's best to ride these tubeless to embrace their hooligan character that might otherwise result in too many pinch punctures with a tube in place. The Ravagers mounted tubeless quickly and easily onto both some Hunt and Kinesis wheels.

These Ravagers benefit from Maxxis's Silk Shield which is its bead-to-bead protection; this gives an additional level of defence to both the sidewalls and underneath the tread. Protection from punctures can often be more down to luck than science, but the Silk Shield does appear to work as these Maxxis tyres have been trouble-free over some quite testing terrain and cavalier riding.

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Around my way there's the tyre-eating double act of hawthorn bushes and sharp flints to deal with, which can breach a tread and destroy a tyre sidewall seemingly at will, and the Ravagers have shrugged them off – and countless other bumps, thumps, thunks and whoops – with no whimpering.

The tyre is also available in an EXO Protection version, which is a cut and abrasion-resistant yet flexible material added to the sidewalls.

You'll feel the drag of the tread on tarmac and smoother off-road, and the heft of the Ravager can be noticeable if you think about it when getting up to speed, but the flip side to this is being able to be far more carefree should you venture into more challenging terrain, where slicker and lighter gravel tyres might have to tip-toe their way along.

In a giggly highlight, the Ravagers showed their true colours by belligerently following two mountain bikes down some rooty technical single track through the trees, along slightly damp trails, at night. The tyres made a very, very respectable fist at allowing a totally outgunned bike to keep up with its fatter-tyred and more capable friends for longer than you might consider necessary, until relying on tyres that were a fraction of the ideal width suddenly made itself felt.

Value

Gravel tyres that offer a level of grip and work in more challenging terrains that you might encounter should you turn left or right off gravel are not common, but they are becoming increasingly so as more people push the bounds of whatever gravel might be.

You might be tempted by the Schwalbe G-One R tyre which looks quite tready and ready to take on similar terrain to the Ravager, and in a more supple way, but the Maxxis does win on side tread, sturdiness and being a fair bit cheaper (the Schwalbe is £70).

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In a similar 'it's a mountain bike tyre really' vein, the WTB Resolute has a chunkier centre tread but in a more open overall pattern, which does play well in the proper off-road arena, and comes in 650B sizing as well. It is still more expensive at £55, though.

The Maxxis looks like it could go head-to-head with the slightly cheaper (£45) Specialized Rhombus Pro 2Bliss Ready, with the Ravagers' centre tread looking a bit more road- and buffed gravel-friendly over the Rhombus' more gnarly overall tread pattern.

Conclusion

For venturing beyond gravel and onto pretty much everything and anything else, the Ravager is a really capable and, more importantly, fun tyre, if you can live with the slightly sluggish tarmac manners and slim profile.

Verdict

More 'off-road' than many might consider 'gravel', and it's great at mucking about in the dirt