Yesterday, I wrote about the fashion industry’s march to absorb everything from the urban bike market–except maybe the bikes, and today the focus swings from leather to carbon fiber, as cycling news sites all cover SRAM’s newest incarnation of the Red road group. “Fashion” might not seem the obvious connection between these two separate sides of the bike business, but, given many of the “meh” reactions to the new Red group–which drops weight and has some genuinely beneficial innovations, but isn’t electronic or one louder, I think it’s safe to say fashion is influencing bike racing technology as much as it is knickers and caps. It’s a different kind of fashion, to be sure, but if you want to get in the most exclusive clubs this year, you’d better have batteries on board.
Which sort of sickens me a little.
Don’t get me wrong. I get the gadget appeal of smoothly operating electronic shifting, but can we at least admit it flies in the face of all the heavily embrocated, “epic,” self-sufficient adventure riding shit? On the one hand, a generally successful subset of people under the age of 40 who’ve not served in the military seem hell bent on proving they aren’t complete and utter pansies–everything from mixed martial arts training to carrying a log through the woods and crawling under barbed wire is hot right now. For those who can afford it, deprivation is pretty hip.
But we have our limits. Sure, we’ll drive three hours to ride a bicycle or pretend to be in basic training, but not without our iPhones. And I guess that dichotomy, between the trendy “quest for the epic struggle” and an obsession with things that make our lives easier can be pretty funny sometimes.
When using electronic shifting, can you still outrun a charging bear and/or piss on an iced up rear derailleur in order to make it home? I guess. Can someone with electronic shifting hunt to survive while lost in the wilderness, using only a sharpened seat post to spear prey? Sure. Epic struggles are still there, I suppose, even when we’re wired. It’s just that adding batteries to something that never needed them in the first place doesn’t seem like progress to me.
Probably just me, though.
At any rate, the new SRAM Red group doesn’t add electronics or an 11th cog out back, choosing instead to drop even more weight and add some features that I do think matter.
Elastomer Stuff Within the Teeth of Your Cassette
Bikerumor posted this SRAM graphic that does a pretty good job of explaining this quickly. Not a game changer, by any means, but, to me, damping the chain impact would seem to have implications beyond just making the cassette quieter. This seems like something that could reduce friction in a significant way going forward, and maybe lead to other advantages.
Rotating Front Derailleur
I hate chain rub more a flat tire. Seriously. It’s kept me using an old twist shifter on my left hand for as long as I can remember. In the new Red “Yaw” front derailleur, SRAM may have found a simple fix for the chain rub that occurs as the angle of the chain changes within the cage depending on your gear combination. And that would be huge. Really. The way some people feel about a “cure” for baldness, I feel about solving this.
CyclingNews had a great photo and description of this.
Hopefully, the solution really wasn’t just as simple as lengthening one of the arms of the derailleur’s parallelogram so that as it moves the cage also rotates slightly, letting the front of the derailleur move out further than the rear. If that’s really all it took, and this derailleur works as advertised (I’m always suspicious, but there’s almost no reason I can see why this wouldn’t work), then SRAM’s engineers deserve a lot of credit. Instead of inventing solutions to problems we don’t actually have, they may have solved one of the arch problems in the world of geared bicycles.
It’s no iPhone, sure, but little engineering details like this can sometimes be what makes riding a bike more enjoyable. Unless you don’t ride for enjoyment, in which case you should buy Di2 or Campy EPS then ride a double century in your bare feet while using Speedplay pedals. No socks, crybaby.
