Continental Terra Hardpack tyre review

The Continental Terra Hardpack tyre sits in the middle of Continental's gravel tyre range. It’s not as speed-orientated as the Terra Speed, but has a less aggressive tread than the Terra Trail.

The Terra Hardpack is described by Continental as a bikepacking tyre. It's made for mixed-terrain days out, with a large contact patch to enable you to run a low psi and dampen trail chatter, without feeling laggy on road drags.

As you might imagine from the name, the Hardpack is designed for dry, fast gravel riding, and not for the mud or wet. In short, it's a gravel bike tyre for summer adventures.

With its 50mm width and developed shoulder lugs, the Terra Hardpack has proven itself a strong all-round tyre for getting out on trails and fire roads.

Continental Terra Hardpack details and specifications

The Terra Hardpack is a mixed-terrain tyre suitable for bikepacking and gravel duties.

It has smooth, tightly packed tread down the middle of the tyre that helps to keep speed and lessen rolling resistance on the tarmac. There are more pronounced knobs on the shoulder of the tyre that are aimed at improving cornering stability.

The tyre’s carcass is built with Continental’s PureGrip compound, to offer a blend of good grip and durability.

It has ShieldWall protection that gives an extra casing layer to help ward off punctures. As is now expected with gravel tyres, it’s tubeless ready, though I ran it with tubes for testing.

The Terra Hardpack comes up slightly narrower than the 700 x 50c sizing would suggest, with the width measuring 47.8mm.

Continental Terra Hardpack performance

Setup was easy onto my Sonder Alpha alloy rims, which are hooked. I got the tyre to seat without any trouble, and needed the help of only a couple of tyre levers for the final lift over the rim.

Out on the road, I found the Terra Hardpack to have none of the sluggishness that 50c tyres sometimes give versus narrower sizes. The central smooth line of the tyre helps keep speed and it rolls confidently.

On well-maintained gravel and fire roads, this sense of speed continued, and I found myself flying across these smoother trails.

The grip was great here – the wide footprint of rubber (and lower pressure this enables you to run), plus the PureGrip compound, damped bumps in the trail and gave the ride a sure-footed feel.

The tyre proved particularly stable when cornering, the sidewall lugs finding powerful grip on everything from loose gravel to dry grass.

Once the trail got wetter, the tyre still had admirable grip on smoother gravel. It could even chug its way through shallow mud and puddles.

However, as soon as I needed to head uphill on slippery surfaces, hit greasy roots, or move through deeper mud, the Terra Hardpacks lost control and started spinning through lack of grip.

This is to be expected, but it really highlights where the tyre’s weakness lies if you’re looking for an all-round performer.

Thankfully, the tyre shed clogged mud fairly quickly once out of the muck.

Though the Terra Hardpack comes with Conti’s ShieldWall system to protect against flats, I did get two punctures while testing. These were both insertion punctures caused by thorns.

On the face of it, this isn’t a particularly good result for the Terra. But because I was running tubes at the time, I didn’t benefit from the self-sealing capabilities that running the tyres tubeless would likely have brought.

The UK autumn brings more than its fair share of hazards too, when you can expect a lot of detritus on the trails.

That mitigation aside, it’s slightly worrying to have suffered two tyre ingresses in my test period. But while the puncture protection didn’t shine on this test, it should perform better when run tubeless.

Compared to other tyres made for fast, dry gravel, the Terra Hardpack is good value – it’s cheaper than the Vittoria Terreno Dry and WTB’s Byway tyres, and performs as well on smooth gravel and road.

Continental Terra Hardpack bottom line

The Continental Terra Hardpack is a tyre that rolls well on tarmac, and handles fire roads and smoother gravel with confidence and ease.

The wide contact patch allows for lower pressures to help dampen trail chatter. However, it works best only as a summer tyre for dry trails and smoother gravel.