For a professional cyclist, signing a new equipment sponsor is hardly unusual. For Dylan Johnson, signing with a tyre sponsor is different.
The professional gravel racer, coach and YouTuber has spent his career purposefully unattached to any one tyre brand, preferring the freedom to test, scrutinise and race whatever he believed was fastest.
“I purposefully have not had a tyre sponsor for my entire career because I think that tyres are probably the most important equipment choice that gravel cyclists make,” Johnson told Cycling Weekly. “And I didn’t want to compromise by being beholden to one brand.”
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That changes now.
Johnson has signed his first tyre sponsorship with Silca as the Indianapolis-based company launches Protocol, its first-ever collection of road and gravel tyres. The contract runs for the remainder of this season and the following two years, Johnson says. But his involvement with the project dates back to 2024 when the brand first approached him.
Johnson is well aware of how the move might look coming from someone whose brand agnosticism has been central to both his racing and his reputation.
“To make this switch, hopefully my audience won’t be like, ‘Oh, Dylan finally sold out,’ because I had quite a hand in the development process of these tyres,” Johnson said.
“I wouldn’t be signing to a tyre company if I didn’t think it was the best tyre on the market, genuinely.”
It also wasn’t a case of Johnson simply being handed a finished product along with a sponsorship contract. He says he was involved from the project’s early stages, testing prototypes and providing feedback on everything from tyre volume and casing construction to ride feel and tread patterns.
That distinction matters for a rider who has built a considerable following by obsessing over equipment choices.
(Image credit: Silca)
When we interviewed Johnson in early 2025, he described himself as an “optimiser”, interested in finding the lightest, most aerodynamic and most efficient set-up possible. And his willingness to question conventional gravel equipment put him at the forefront of the gravel discipline’s move toward much larger tyres.
After his own real-world and wind-tunnel experiments, Johnson turned to large-volume, thin-casing cross-country mountain bike tyres for gravel racing long before it became trendy. He argued that, counterintuitively, those tyres could roll faster over rough gravel while offering better puncture protection than many conventional gravel tyres.
Johnson remembers 2024 as the season when the wider trend took hold.
“2024 was the year when U.S. gravel racers made the switch from 45s to mountain bike tyres,” he said. At Mid South early that season, he recalls only a handful of racers making the choice. By Big Sugar that fall, “it seemed like nearly everybody that could fit mountain bike tyres on their gravel bike was on mountain bike tyres.”
The bike industry has quickly caught up. Tyre clearance has continued to grow across recent gravel launches, with most 2026 releases easily accommodating mountain-bike-sized rubber. Specialized’s latest Diverge and Crux clear a 55mm tyre, for example, while Factor’s new Sarana goes to 57mm and the new Open W.I.D.E clears a gargantuan 66mm.
For Johnson, being sponsor-free had been central to his experimentation, and his tyre choices changed according to the course: a Continental Race King for rougher events, a Schwalbe Thunder Burt for courses where lower rolling resistance took priority, and a narrower gravel tyre only when a course contained enough pavement to alter the equation.
So when Silca approached him for input back in 2024, Johnson says his demands of a gravel tyre were clear. He wanted significant volume combined with a thinner casing, essentially retaining the lessons that had drawn him towards XC tyres in the first place.
“It needs to be wide, probably 55 millimetres, and it needs to be a thinner casing than most of these gravel tyres are,” Johnson recalls telling Silca. The response, he says, was that this was already exactly the direction the company was pursuing.
Meet SILCA’s Protocol line of tyres
(Image credit: Silca)
Rather than starting with a traditional road-tyre construction and adding more material and volume for gravel, Silca says it worked from the principles of cross-country mountain bike tyres towards a high-efficiency gravel platform. The company calls it an “inverse proportional” design approach: pairing larger tyre volumes with thinner, high-density 120 TPI casings.
At modern, lower inflation pressures, Silca claims the construction allows the casing to deflect around impacts more effectively, with the aim of reducing rolling resistance and weight without compromising puncture protection.
“For years, the industry approached gravel tyres by just slapping thick, heavy rubber onto traditional road tyre carcasses,” said Silca CEO Joshua Poertner.
“By optimising casing ply angles, tread profiles, and material science together, we’ve created a tyre platform that is faster, lighter, and more supple without sacrificing durability.”
Silca’s entry into the tyre market consists of three gravel models and one road tyre.
(Image credit: Silca)
- Protocol RCG-1 for fast hardpack and mixed-surface gravel
- Protocol RCG-3 for all-around rough-terrain gravel
- Protocol RCG-4 for adventure, mud and loose trail
- Protocol RCR for high-volume road
Silca positions the Protocol RCG-1 as its fastest gravel option, intended for smoother hardpack and mixed-surface courses. It pairs a low, ramped directional centre tread with taller side knobs intended to add bite as the bike leans into a corner.
The RCG-3 moves towards rougher gravel, with tightly spaced centre knobs that increase in size towards the shoulder and additional puncture protection beneath the tread. Silca positions it for demanding, rougher courses such as Unbound and Big Sugar.
For mud, sand, loose rock and more adventure-oriented riding, the RCG-4 gets considerably more aggressive, widely spaced lugs, along with bead-to-bead puncture protection.
Finally, there is the Protocol RCR, a high-volume road tyre. Silca says the RCR similarly uses increased air volume for impact absorption rather than relying on additional layers of rubber. The 29mm version is optimised around modern 25mm-internal hookless rims, while the 38mm model maximises volume within UCI regulations.
Across the Protocol range, Silca uses its new Pulsar rubber compound, carbon-fibre beads and size-specific rim compatibility. The company says its casing geometry and asymmetric tread designs are intended to minimise energy losses while improving stability, braking and cornering grip.
For Johnson, however, the spec sheet alone wasn’t enough.
He says Silca has put the tyres through both rolling-resistance and puncture-resistance testing, the two factors he personally considers most important for gravel, using both indoor and outdoor methods.
“They did drum testing and then John Karrasch, who does all the outdoor testing, he has done outdoor testing,” Johnson said. “So it’s been tested indoors and outdoors.”
Karrasch’s testing provides an increasingly popular counterpoint to traditional laboratory drum tests. His outdoor work uses the Chung, or Virtual Elevation, method to calculate rolling resistance on pavement and several grades of actual gravel. Some tyres that perform quickly on a drum remain fast on real-world, off-road conditions, while others do not.
(Image credit: Silca)
During the past year-and-a-half, Johnson has also experienced the less glamorous side of product development, riding prototypes through multiple iterations – some better than others. The final versions, he says, have resolved any issues he encountered along the way.
“I think the tyres feel great,” he said, describing the handling as predictable and the traction in line with what he would expect from the tread designs.
The RCG-1 and RCG-3 have now effectively replaced Johnson’s previous two favourite race options. The Schwalbe Thunder Burt had been replaced with the RCG-1. And for chunkier terrain, higher puncture risk and races where cornering traction matters more, the RCG-3 takes over from the Continental Race King.
There is, inevitably, reputational risk in that declaration.
“I do realise the risk of signing a tyre deal after I’ve been Mr Tire Agnostic Guy for so long,” he said. “I hope my audience can recognise this.”
His own involvement aside, Johnson’s confidence comes partly from watching Silca enter product categories in which it previously had little experience, pointing specifically to the company’s chain wax and tubeless sealant. That track record, he says, made him more comfortable racing on a first-generation tyre from a company that had never previously made one.
Ultimately, though, his argument is simpler: no sponsorship cheque is worth using equipment that he believes could cost him a result.
“It’s not worth a paycheck to be on an inferior product to me,” Johnson said. “For me personally, it’s not worth a paycheck to be on a product that’s gonna cost me race results down the line.”
To that end, he left us with one final endorsement:
“I’ve not punctured a Silca tyre yet.”
(Image credit: Silca)
The Silca Protocol range is priced at $99 USD / £99 / €119 / $149 CAD / $159.95 AUD and is now available from Silca’s website and select retailers.
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