Has anyone purchased '28mm' Continental GP 4Season tyres recently? If so, how wide are they (and on what rim width and at what pressure)?
I've had many of these tyres labelled as '28mm' over the years, but all of them have struggled to get to 26.0mm wide, even after stretching from plenty of use, and even on a 17mm internal width rim.
However, I'm wondering if Continental has changed anything, perhaps in the last year or so. This is because I saw in the wild not long ago a pair of GP 4Season tyres, labelled as '28mm' on rims I know to be 17mm internal width, and they seemed (looked and felt) enormous compared with all of my '28s' - not as large as 32mm GP 4Seasons, which are pretty close to or slightly over 32mm (so they weren't mis-labelled 32s), but definitely a lot larger than 26mm. I didn't have measuring calipers with me, but I've handled enough 26-26.5mm GP 4Seasons for years on a variety of rim widths to know exactly how wide they feel by hand, and how wide they look.
I wasn't able to interrogate the owner as to the provenance of their tyres - hence the query about recent purchases that some may have made.
Of course, Continental has always been irritatingly untrustworthy in the labelling of its tyre sizes. The '28mm' GP4000S II famously measures well over 29mm on a 15mm internal width Open Pro....but it seems, going by early reports, that its replacement, the new GP5000, is actually substantially narrower than the equivalent GP4000S II.
I'm still wanting GP 4Seasons that are wider than 26mm, but without having to make the huge jump to the 32mm version - so has Continental actually started making its '28mm' GP 4Seasons at the right size, or has this one-off sighting falsely got my hopes up?