Getting your tire setup right can make or break your cyclocross race. Choose the wrong tread or even a quarter of a bar too much pressure for the course or conditions, and you’ll flounder around the turns, giving up seconds to your competitors as you slide around the mud and sand.

EF Pro Cycling mechanic Tom Hopper brings decades of world-class cyclocross experience to our team. Before he became Lachlan Morton’s right-hand man for his Far Beyond adventures, Tom was a race mechanic for the USA’s top cyclocrossers. He spent countless hours in the pits, out in muddy Belgian fields, practicing the art and science of cyclocross tire setup. He has glued tubulars for world championships and studied rubber compounds and tread design to help racers go every little bit faster.

Tom is thrilled that we now have our own EF Pro Cycling cyclocross squad, made up of U23 European champion Mattia Agostinacchio, his brother Filippo Agostinacchio, and Nina Berton. With Vittoria’s full range of A Dugast Series tires at our squad’s disposal, Tom’s cyclocross mind is spinning again, daydreaming about how they could optimize their setups for race courses like Namur, Antwerp, and Zonhoven.

The principles of tire choice and setup apply whether you’re racing around your local park or hurtling through tunnels of thousands of roaring, beer-swilling fans. We asked Tom for his best tips for cyclocross tire setup.

Cyclocross races are won and lost in the corners. Carry your speed better through the turns and you’ll have to make fewer violent accelerations to stay in the race. Every time you open a meter’s gap on the rival behind you and force them to sprint to get back on your wheel, they will have one less sprint left in their legs when the race nears its finale. Riding high- and low-speed corners fast is a great skill that requires tire traction. Just watch the pros.

“Watch a World Cup, watch the leaders, and watch one decisive section,” Tom says. “Notice how much faster the leaders can go through those corners than the riders who are chasing behind them. If you think about one turn and then multiply by — let’s say there are 10 or 15 of those turns per lap — the riders in front are gaining seconds every lap on their competitors. A lot of that comes from talent and practice, but a lot of it is bike setup and tire pressure and tire choice too. Your equipment choices can drastically improve or decrease your performance.”

For cornering, the most important thing is grip. When your tires have good purchase on the dirt, you can brake later and carry more speed through the turns with less risk of sliding out. Optimizing grip is a matter of tire choice and tire pressure. The basic principle is simple, though.

“You want the rubber contact patch to stay in contact with the ground for the maximum and smoothest amount of time possible,” Tom says.

Dialing in your tire pressure for a race is an art and a science that depends on a number of factors, including your weight and racing style, the course and conditions, and your tactics. For the best grip, you basically want to run the lowest pressure you can run without bottoming out the tire.

“My rule of thumb when you are pre-riding the course is that you can touch the rim once per lap,” Tom says. “That’s going to let you know that you are really close to your number — the tire pressure is good everywhere, and there is just one extreme, one big impact spot, where you’re almost bottoming out or hitting the rim. You don’t want it to be harsh, but when you're doing a nice hot lap and you're really pushing the bike and the tires, and you find one spot where you're like, ‘Okay, I'm really close to hitting the ground,’ then you're probably pretty close to your number. Obviously the number is different for everyone, but for a track where you need traction and you're trying to run as low of a pressure as you can, that's generally a good rule of thumb. It’s going to allow you to have the most traction and stay upright and have your best ride. If you’re white-knuckled and constantly about to catch yourself from slipping out, that's not good for confidence and obviously not good for speed. You want to find that low number that is going to make you so much faster through the corners.”

Vittoria’s A Dugast Series tires come in tubeless and tubular versions. Built with supple, high-threadcount cotton casings, both types of tire are designed for grip, speed and control on the toughest courses. With Dugast’s famous race-proven cyclocross treads, the tubeless tires in the series are much easier to set up and are proven to be excellent tires for training and recreational racing. Home mechanics can mount them in a few minutes, without having to prep rims or wait for hours for tubular glue to cure.

Mounting tubulars well is an art honed by years of practice that requires real expertise. Professional mechanics like Tom are valued by elite cyclocross racers because they have that skill.

“Tubulars are certainly more labor intensive,” Tom says. “It's not the same as gluing for the road, where you can slap a couple layers of glue on, pump it up to 5.5 bar or whatever, and know the pressure is going to keep that tire on the rim. You need to be skilled at gluing tubs to make sure the tire is never going to roll, which is the worst thing that could happen to a race mechanic. Anyone can set their wheels up tubeless. Tubulars are for elite-level racing. It takes a lot of work and skill to mount them right.”

For elite racing — World Cups, the Belgian Superprestige series, and courses where riders want to run super low pressures — the control and grip provided by tubular tires remains unmatched.

“At a race like, let's say, Namur, where there are not a ton of impacts, or at any Belgian tractor-pull, where you’re out in a muddy field, you just want ultimate traction,” Tom says. “Depending on how much you weigh, you might want to run 0.8 to 1 bar. If you ran a tubeless tire that low, you will likely burp that tire. You could burp air or sealant out where the rim and the tire meet. At such low pressure, tubulars are just superior. The tubular, if it's glued properly, is going to give you the best patch of traction at the lowest pressure. There is a reason why the pros are still riding them. The fact that the tubular is glued to your rim and the sidewalls have that structure to help the tire keep its form at low pressure gives it a superior ride feel. It is a really hard thing to describe unless you go and ride them in muddy conditions with the right pressure, and then you are just like, ‘Mate.’ The ride feel is so amazing.”

The Vittoria A Dugast Series includes tires with five different tread patterns, each tailored for racing in certain conditions. The Pipistrello is a semi-slick built to perform in deep sand or very fast hardpack dirt or snow, with microknobs for grip and cornering control. The Pipisquallo features larger studs for better traction in mud and gunk-shedding chevrons toward the sidewalls. The Typhoon is an all-purpose racing tire with a specially designed tread that provides grip in all conditions. The Small Bird is also a great choice for mixed conditions. Its outer studs are double the height of the studs in the middle and made from a very soft rubber compound for better cornering grip in slippery mud. The Rhino is Vittoria’s all-out mud tire. It features an open tread design to shed mud and debris fast and extremely high knobs for excellent grip.

“The Rhino is the super-mudder tire,” Tom says. “The shape of the knobs and the height of the rubber are designed to shed mud off the tread. When you are racing, you want to dig in and get traction, but you also want to release it immediately. If mud or snow or dirt sticks to your tire, you might as well ride a slick. You won’t get any traction because you’re carrying so much ground material on the tire. With the Rhino, the diagonal shape heading away from the center to the sidewall sheds that mud so that when it rotates again and digs back into the dirt, you have more traction. Generally, the taller the tread, the more aggressive the terrain and conditions. On dry tires, the treads aren't as tall and you don't see as much tread on the sides. In the sand, you want something like the Pipistrello — the fastest tire possible — to carry your momentum and ride a section farther into the ruts that get created.”

The best way to learn which tires and pressures work best for you in various conditions is to go out and get dirty. Push your equipment in training and find your limits. And pay attention to what experienced racers are using.

“Whether it’s a local race or a World Cup, if you head out for the pre-ride, you’ll see athletes squeezing other people’s tires and trying to figure out what they’re running,” Tom says. “Try to absorb as much as you can. Realizing, ‘Okay, wow, they’re running Rhinos today and they feel super low,’ can be super valuable. Getting to know some OG who has experience on a course can go a long way too. Maybe they say, ‘We always run the Rhinos here,’ or ‘We always run the Typhoons.’ That’s valuable knowledge. A lot of cyclocross races have been around for a long time and people know what works. Nothing compares to experiencing them yourself, though. Go out and work out, ‘I need to run this tire or this pressure here to be the most successful.’

Get out there. Get practicing. Get your Vittoria A Dugast Series tires muddy.