Making the leap
14 03 09 - 18:19
Little has remained of the original plan to equip this bike with a full SRAM Rival groupset, but the core components are the derailleurs, and like the other two groupset manufacturers you pretty much have to stay pure with the gear shifters. Choosing a shifter remains the most controversial and divisive option on a multi-geared bike, and I won't know for a while whether I've got it right even for myself; there will never be any satisfying die-hard proponents of the big S and C companies.
My little brother is pretty much a Campagnolo loyalist, but I could never reconcile myself to the funny thumb shift thing from an aesthetic point of view. Campagnolo levers are cheap, though, and I could have had Record 10s for the price of Rival, but the derailleurs are correspondingly expensive and a drop to Centaur for the mechanisms would have been on a par budget-wise. That combination would have been heavy, too. Shimano's offering at this price is Ultegra SL, but it is handily trumped by Rival on weight. Adding function to the equation, Ultegra would surely have been a step up from the 105 on my hack bike, but enough to bring it to level pegging with the Rival on father's TT bike which impressed me at the end of last season? Maybe not. The biggest motive for making the leap, though, is just how clever and simple the SRAM double tap system is. One lever to do everything seems so obvious now, but it's likely that as third to the table SRAM were only forced to make this leap (there's that catchphrase again) of imagination to avoid infringement of Shimano and Campagnolo patentsTrackback link:
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