Continental Grand Prix 4 Season Review

The Continental Grand Prix 4 Season is a popular bike tire among consumers and professionals alike. We combine our hands-on experience across more than 1,500 miles with third-party feedback so you can stay informed.

Handmade in Germany using high-quality raw materials and industry-leading technologies, Continental advertises that their Grand Prix 4 Season clincher tire offers robust puncture protection, longevity, grip, and overall performance, whether you’re touring or training.

Puncture resistance and cut protection are provided by a double Vectran™ breaker belt underneath the tread, which the company claims offers the “highest level available on the market.”

And on its sidewalls, the ultra-fine DuraSkin polyamide fabric is said to protect the casing “against the worst conditions,” while delivering a suppler ride. Visually, this sidewall fabric also offers a unique brown appearance.

We’re told the black “Max Grip Silica” compound optimizes wet weather and low-temperature adhesion, while also resisting wear and extending tread life.

Together, the Continental website tells us that the 4 Season represents the ultimate combination of speed, light weight, wet weather performance, puncture resistance, and sidewall protection. Third party pricing fell between $42 and $64 at the time of writing.

Does this necessarily mean they’re worth the investment, though? We rode the Grand Prix 4 Season tires more than 1,500 miles so you can answer this question for yourself. We’ll begin with the details.

Continental Grand Prix 4 Season Specs

We found Amazon rider reviews (more soon) for the Grand Prix 4 Season tire going back as far as 2010, so it’s been on the market a fair amount of time.

As a whole, the Grand Prix lineup targets road-oriented riders looking for all-around performance, a neutral design, excellent puncture protection, and high mileage. Despite these characteristics, they also indicate the line features exceptionally low rolling resistance and excellent comfort.

Staying true to this ethos, with multiple sizes available, the tire can accommodate tasks from traditional road riding and commuting to long-distance touring and light-duty cyclocross.

Compared to some of the other tires in the Grand Prix lineup, the 4 Season doesn’t feature Continental’s Black Chili Compound, though. This, they say, is a rubber mixture “based on the latest knowledge of polymers and raw materials research” that maximizes the balance between grip, rolling resistance, and longevity.

The 4 Season also doesn’t contain Continental’s PolyX Breaker often found in other Grand Prix tires, a polyester fiber that’s woven tightly into the carcass in a crosswise pattern, which helps maximize puncture resistance without impacting rolling resistance.

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On the other hand, the 4 Season does feature a Double Vectran Breaker, which Continental describes as a spider silk-like synthetic fiber made from a liquid-crystalline polymer (LCP).

Compared to traditional nylon, they tell us this LCP is spun into strands and then again into threads, which join with the tire at a 45-degree angle. Together, they say this delivers lightweight flexibility, along with puncture and sidewall protection, without negatively impacting rolling resistance.

Continental’s DuraSkin technology implements polyamide fabric to boost sidewall protection further and also provides a uniquely brown color.

Taken together, the 4 Season is more of a performance-oriented Grand Prix tire useful for racing, touring, and grand touring in wet weather and low temps. Other models are more oriented toward:

• Classic: Touring, racing (no grand touring)
• 4000 SII: Touring, with a heavier emphasis on racing
• 4000 S II Tubular: A tubular version that adds grand touring capability
• GT: Grand touring, touring
• Supersonic: Tuning

My Long-Term Experience With the Continental Grand Prix 4 Season Tire

I’ve logged somewhere in the neighborhood of 1,500 miles on a set of 4 Seasons since April 2018, with my longest single ride exceeding 100 miles.

During this time, I’ve used them on just about every type of terrain, including gravel, asphalt, shallow sand, and concrete, with steep climbs and fast descents—often all in the same ride. In fact, the only conditions I’ve yet to use them in are sub-freezing, with ice or snow.

Overall? I’ve found the 4 Seasons offer excellent traction in every condition, and are entirely predictable. Whether climbing, descending, accelerating, braking, cornering, or wedged in the drops during fierce headwinds, I don’t have to think about them—they do their job and let me enjoy the ride.

Tire pressure is mostly a matter of personal preference, and I tend to run my 4 Seasons at the lower end of the spectrum; usually somewhere between 75 and 80 PSI, front and rear. I’ve found this provides optimal small bump compliance and suppleness, especially in the frequent instances where I hop off the pavement for a bit of dirt action.

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On pavement and loosely packed dirt, I found my 4 Seasons are fast rollers. I think the DuraSkin sidewalls look great, and the puncture protection they provide is phenomenal. In fact, despite the miles logged, I’ve yet to experience a flat.

As is common, the rear tire has worn meaningfully faster than the front. I would expect another 300-500 miles remaining before the rear tire needs to be replaced, depending on where and how I ride.

Complaints? Only one: mounting the 700 x 32C folding beads onto my DT Swiss CR 1600 wheels wasn’t exactly easy, which seems common among other riders (more soon).

Pro tip: I’ve found that adding a small amount of grease (or even Aquaphor/Vaseline, or a bit of baby powder) on opposite ends of the 4 Season’s bead, or the rim’s edge, can help immensely. In fact, you could even lock them on with a single tire iron. Just make sure you wipe off any excess after mounting.

Are other riders experiencing the same? Before covering this important topic, let’s briefly compare the Grand Prix 4 Season to perhaps its closest competitor from the same company.

Grand Prix 4 Season Vs. Continental Gatorskin

A Quick Rundown

The Gatorskin is another extraordinarily popular all-around bike tire line from Continental. And based on its features, it’s vying for many of the same customers as the Grand Prix 4 Season.

Here, we’ll start by taking a glance at their meaningful differences:

A More Detailed Look

Now, we’ll zoom in and take a closer look at some of their meaningful differences:

Perhaps the most obvious is that the Gatorskin features no center tread. On the sides, it has a similar ‘reptilian’ pattern as the 4 Season, although it’s contained in smaller, teardrop-like formations on each side.

Both models use Continental’s DuraSkin technology, although the Gatorskin replaces 4 Season’s Vectran Breaker with their PolyX Breaker. Whereas the former uses a single layer liquid-crystalline polymer (LCP) applied at a 45-degree angle, the latter adds a second crosswise layer for maximum puncture protection.

Both come with three-ply construction, although Gatorskin’s 180 TPI is meaningfully lower than 4 Season’s 330. It also comes with a slightly lower recommended PSI (85-102), as well as a slightly higher weight at 350 g for the 700 x 32C folding version. The Gatorskin also has a wire (i.e., non-folding) bead available in the same size, which increases weight to 420 g per tire.

Functionally, Bicycle Rolling Resistance’s Jarno Bierman reports that the Gatorskin’s rolling resistance is almost two watts higher than the 4 Season’s when inflated to 120 PSI (which increases to almost 4 watts at 60 PSI), while the latter’s puncture resistance is only one point higher.

However, the Gatorskin is also available in a much wider range of sizes, including 27 x 1 ¼, 650 x 23C, and 26 x 1 1/8, along with a tubular Sprinter model.

Price-wise, third-party retailers sold the 700 X 32C folding Gatorskin tire for between $35 and $45 as of this writing. 4 Seasons were priced higher at between $42 and $64.

Online Grand Prix 4 Season Bike Tire Reviews

Because the 4 Season has been around for so long, quite a bit of online feedback has accumulated. Let’s quickly break this vast data into smaller bites:

Professional Grand Prix 4 Season Feedback

Between sites like VeloNews, BikeRadar, and Mantel.com, most hands-on reviewers reported that the 4 Season’s softer rubber compound offered a nice balance between support and comfort, and well as between low rolling resistance and a thick puncture belt for extra flat protection.

Traction-wise, many appreciated its wet weather grip, along with its ability to adapt to a variety of conditions.

So, whether you’re a commuter, gravel racer, or anything in between, Mantel‘s Simon Kikken perhaps summarized it best when noting that it offers a sweet spot between a lightweight racing tire and a more substantial, but highly puncture-resistant, winter tire. And in the end, that it’s a “true jack of all trades and an absolute must-have for any rider who plans on riding on through the fall.”

One of the biggest common complaints among these sites, though, was that the 4 Season is definitely on the pricier side. In fact, as we discussed in the previous section, you could pay almost twice as much for a 4 Season tire than a Gatorskin, depending on the retailer.

Grand Prix 4 Season Consumer Insight

Not to sound like a broken record, but the Grand Prix 4 Season has been around for ages, at least by cycling standards.

As a result, we came across more than 2,700 combined customer reviews among third-party sites like Amazon, Chain Reaction Cycles, REI, Competitive Cyclist, Wiggle.com, and Performance Bike, to name just a handful. Overall, it had about a 4.5-star average rating.

While many of the compliments aligned with professional feedback, a small percentage of customers commonly complained of less wear/puncture resistance than expected, especially related to sidewalls.

Let’s go ahead and bring all of these details together, roll across the finish line, and come to a conclusion about 4 Season bike tires.

Our Parting Thoughts About Continental’s Grand Prix 4 Season Bike Tire

Will you pay a premium for Grand Prix 4 Season tires? You bet.

However, based on my experience riding them 1,500+ miles across a wide variety of terrain and weather conditions—without a single flat—I think they deliver much more value than their price tag. After all, any flat tire is one too many.

I even tested Continental’s competing Gatorskin tires for a couple of hundred miles on a previous cycling setup for comparison, and found that the 4 Seasons offered immensely better flat protection for the conditions where I ride.

Fast-forward to today, and I’ve found the 4 Seasons also deliver great sidewall protection when I decide to hit smoother dirt trails, with the occasional small-to-moderate size rock thrown in.

There also isn’t a lot of rolling resistance, despite its great (some might say phenomenal) puncture resistance. I was even satisfied enough with their grip that I didn’t switch out to a summer tire with less tread this past year.

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