Scott’s 32“ Gravel-Prototype breaks Cover at UNBOUND – The Future of Gravel-Racing?

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Right on cue for the UNBOUND Gravel race in Kansas, Scott have become one of the first bike manufacturers to throw a 32” gravel prototype into the mix. The brand are testing the concept with last year’s winner Cameron Jones and ultra-distance specialist Robin Gemperle on the brutal 200-mile course. What started life as a theoretical concept on the drawing board now has to prove itself at the toughest gravel race in the world.

The gravel racing scene has evolved massively in recent years. The trend towards significantly wider tires is impossible to ignore, and it’s something we recently explored in depth in our big gravel tire group test. Just a few years ago, slim 40 mm tires were considered the benchmark. Now, 45 mm rubber and, depending on the race, even XC tires measuring over 50 mm wide have become the norm. While 32” wheels promise similar performance gains, they also rewrite the rulebook entirely. Moving to this wheel size demands far more radical solutions and introduces an entirely new level of engineering challenges.

That becomes obvious when you look at the two Scott riders putting the prototype through its paces at UNBOUND. Swiss ultra-endurance specialist Robin Gemperle, standing at 1.88 m, will presumably be riding a large frame where the huge wheels still look reasonably proportional. New Zealander Cameron Jones, at around 1.80 m tall, is a far better benchmark for the average rider. That’s exactly where the technical limitations start to appear.

Particularly with medium and smaller frame sizes below 56 cm, the concept quickly runs into packaging issues. The enormous wheels force engineers to use a much shorter head tube to keep the already towering stack height under control, which often leaves aggressively slammed stems as the only viable solution. Combine that with the goal of maintaining a compact, aggressive wheelbase for sharp handling and toe overlap with the oversized front wheel becomes almost inevitable.

The bikes ridden by both athletes are built around a specially developed Scott RC Gravel 32 frameset and roll on huge custom-built wheels fitted with 50 mm Schwalbe G-ONE RX tires. The component choices are particularly fascinating because the industry still has no established standards for this wheel size.

While Cameron Jones is running a mix of Shimano XTR components and Dura-Ace shifters paired with ultra-short 160 mm cranks and custom Industry Nine wheels, Robin Gemperle lines up with SRAM’s RED XPLR 13-speed groupset. Unsurprisingly, both riders are full of praise, especially when talking about the supposedly revolutionary cornering traction.
Officially, Scott stress that these are purely prototype bikes and will never reach production in their current form. But it’s worth reading between the lines here. These bikes required genuine, eye-wateringly expensive carbon moulds to be produced. It’s hard to imagine any manufacturer investing that level of financial and logistical effort, opening entirely new tooling, purely to create a feasibility study destined to sit in a display cabinet. History tends to tell a different story: what wins races like UNBOUND usually finds its way into production sooner or later.
We already had the chance to test a similar feasibility study developed by design studio Faction Bikes a few weeks ago, and you’ll …