New gravel bike for bikepacking races: 29" or 32" tires?

[W_B]

Hello everybody,

I am in the market for a new bike, and could use some second opinions.

I’ll first start with explaining how I ride and what I want to use the bike for.

I live in Belgium, at the edge of the famous ‘Flemish Ardennes’ region.

The riding I do near my home is mostly road, but roads are not always in great condition here, and often paved roads turn into short stretches of gravel.

My road bike from 2010 until 2022 was a Cannondale SystemSix, with which I was already pushing the boundaries of road riding long before gravel was a thing.

So when I bought a new bike in 2022, I opted for a gravel bike: a Cinelli Nemo Gravel.

This bike has been the perfect bike for the road riding I do: I run it with semi-slick 40mm tires that are comfortable on bad roads and it is no problem to add some stretches of gravel in my route if I feel like doing that.

However, when the trail gets rougher, there is not much fun to be had with 40 mm tires. A lot of the gravel in the region are double track farm roads, which are muddy in winter and teeth rattling when dried out in summer.

The Cinelli only has clearance for max. 40 mm tires.

In 2025, I started doing something I dreamed about for years: bikepacking races.

My first race was El Piri in Spain, and it was quite clear that I was underbiking with the Cinelli. El Piri is the kind of race for which a ‘standard’ gravel bike doesn’t offer enough comfort, but for which a mountain bike might be overkill. The trails are steep and rough but never really technical. Immediately after I started thinking about what would be the ideal bike for this kind of terrain, and I landed on a ‘monster gravel bike’: a geometry that is as close as possible to the Cinelli, but with wide mountain bike tires. (Two years later this seems to have become the standard gravel bike, if I see how much tire clearance all new bikes have.)

I want my new bike to be a bike that I can use for that kind of rougher bikepacking races, and to be able to ride the local farm roads with more comfort.

Titanium frame (scratch resistant, because of the frame bags), mechanical shifting, no cables through the headset).

I actually had already decided on which bike it was going to be: the Curve Big Kev V2.

But then came 32”, and now I am really doubting what to buy.

I truly believe that 32” wheels make a lot of sense for gravel, and I really like how the big wheels look on a smaller frame (I ride size M).

I also like to be an ‘early adopter’

Also, I buy a bike to keep for at least 10 years, and I am afraid that if I buy a 29” gravel bike now it will be outdated very soon when 32” takes over.

The problem is that Curve has a 32” prototype, but the bike won’t be available to buy for another year.

There are some alternatives, but I want to buy the bike via the bike leasing program of my employer and none of those alternatives are available through leasing.

What would you guys do? Being rational and just buy the Big Kev? Or being patient and wait for the 32” version?

[Stefan_Hofmeister]

In the exact same boat as you. 32" is definitely a frontier with so much performance potential in bikepacking and ultra cycling that it is going to be a very exciting few years of development!

The biggest sticking point for me, entirely as it relates to ultra/bikepacking, is the robustness and reliability of 32" as a platform: from component availability, to diversity of offerings, to familiarity of it’s necessary hardware around the places that the sport may take me.

This discipline of cycling is definitively extreme and probes into edge cases of both hardware requirements and how its used.. While a lot of that still applies regardless of what bike you’re riding, introducing more variables into the mix makes everything from executing a race strategy (at best), to riding through/out of demanding or dangerous conditions harder to pull off. I think the biggest thing to determine if any given hardware choice is right for you is to weigh that consideration for the races that you are preparing for and see yourself doing. What’s perfectly reasonable and sustainable in choice in mainland Europe may not cut it at SRMR or in Tierra del Fuego; whereas the benefits of a dialled 32" rig could greatly outweight the risk at Hope 1000, y’know?

Boiling it down, with mainstream adoption of 32" frames and peripheral hardware being literally at the door (Trek Superfly, Scotts of every variety, and endless number of smaller manufacturers), anywhere with a built out bike shop infrastructure would hopefully be more reasonable territory to feel comforatble in executing in a race without excess “there is not a compatible tire on this continent” risk. If you’re the type of person who likes to be on the early adopter side, I would go full send on a 32" rig that works for you (and then post the pictures so we can see it :P) and be the person at the race with the cool new bike. It’d at least be a fun adventure hardware-wise, in addition to the ride!