Didn't know we were headed to dinner, because he's bringing a pretty big plate on that cassette.


Otherwise, I personally went 1x on the CX bike. I use it for gravel also. The speed differential in mtb, gravel, and CX is smaller than road. When applying real power in road you can go as slow as 6mph and fast as 40mph while giving it the beans.

CX? What, maybe 6mph to low to mid 20's mph? Gravel a little quicker downhill, maybe 30. I can't where I live, curves downhill slow it. Road? I've done mountain rides going only 5 to 6mph going up and easily pedaling a 50-11 at 35mph. That's a difference of 30mph over your gears versus only 14 to 25mph difference in other bike disciplines. In the flat, guys can sprint over 35mph. What are you going to do if you've got both a sprint finish on a flat 30km after some climb that has a 15% grade for a 1/4 mile on it?

That's why.

In a race with 9 riders a gear change means changing 18 chainrings. Race bikes plus the bikes on the follow cars. To me that is kind of a pain in the ass.

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Kevin

http://kevinmetcalfe.dreamhosters.com
My Strava

5 minutes times 18 for a 9 rider team (including spare bikes on the follow cars). That sounds like 1.5 hours. That sounds like a lot of time.

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Kevin

http://kevinmetcalfe.dreamhosters.com
My Strava

Go to the Sheldon Brown gearing calculator Choose the option "MPH @ x" rpm. (I choose 90 rpm). Create a 1x setup. I choose a 50t ring and a SRAM XX1 10x42 cassette. Look at the size of the jumps both in speed and % difference. Then do the same for a 36x52 w/ a 11x28 cassette. In the 1x setup the jump between the top two gears (14 to 12) is 6 mph or 20 percent at 90 rpm.

I run the 36x52, 11x28 for most of my riding. I don't need to look down to tell when I made the shift from my 36x17 to the 15 when I'm cruising around. The difference is much bigger than the other shifts and it's obvious to me. That change is only 13.3%. It is big enough though that I will always choose a cassette that avoids that jump for racing if I can, whether it means an 11x26 or a SRAM 11x28 (that has the 16).

I never raced on the pro tour, but I've been racing bikes for over 30 years. No fucking way would I ever road race on a 1x. It's just stupid. Crits or flat road races, sure go ahead, but real road racing? No way. Having an extra bike just for flat races doesn't seem like much of a simplification to me. I can race my bike in a flat crit or up Pikes Peak or Mauna Kea by throwing on a different cassette. That is simplification.

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Kevin

http://kevinmetcalfe.dreamhosters.com
My Strava

My point was more....(1) you don’t lose 50% of your gears; and (2) what consequences flow from less than ideal gearing...you pedal a hill a little slower? Get dropped in a group ride? Lose a “race”? Life moves on...quickly...for a pro it may be different but for the rest of us, this is a hobby. I’m not going hungry if I ride :30 slower because my gearing wasn’t perfect. And I’ll wake up the next day and be just fine.

Don't you run Di2? For $80, you don't have to guess. Get a D-Fly, put it in your system, and you have the data. How are you defining "most used"? Time? Distance? Incidence?

Even though you're super human, I'd be surprised if your rank order went like that by any of those measures. The rough numbers just don't make sense to me, even at your speed and power to weight. But I will eat my words if shown data otherwise

I think you should differentiate between the 11 speed paradigm and the shift to 13 speed. Same question for you as MTM: do you run Di2? Do you have $80? Can you share your data? This is all knowable. This whole dick measuring contest of how big of gears you run and how much time you spend there and how frequently you run out of gears looks like just that -- it's self reporting on your own dick with gut instinct as your ruler. We can actually look the numbers and maybe cyclenuntz can design a spreadsheet to make sense of it with actual statistics.

Your analysis holds cadence exactly equal, which isn't reality. You may notice the difference between 13 and 15, but does it impact your performance? How tight is your cadence distribution around the mean (or median, I guess)?

All that said, I fall exactly where you do in the 2x world. 52-36 and 11-28 allows for just about everything short of climbing Pikes Peak, etc. which is an extreme outlier. In my opinion that should be the gearing choice for the vast majority riders in the 3.8 to 5.0 W/kg range, assuming average/normal cadence bands and average/normal terrain (not pancake flat). I think everyone below 3.8 should be on a compact.

11 speeds isn't the end game here; 13 speeds is the end. That is where 2x goes away entirely for almost everyone, including pro tour riders. This PDF says it all to me.

I have a D-Fly. Haven't analysed the files, though. Wasn't there a site where you could upload the files and easily see a split of the gears used? I would define most used by time.

The average speed for my last three TT's have been 50.9, 52.5, and 53.8 kph. My average cadence is right around 90 rpm. Rear wheel roll-out around 2090mm. The "average" gear would be somewhere between 12T and 13T. I would be surprised if I didn't use the cogs from 11-15 the most.

13 speeds is remarkable, but what does rotor do to fit 13 cogs in a rear wheel hub? Wafer thin cogs? Hugely offset hub? Something else?

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Advanced Aero TopTube Storage for Road, Gravel, & Tri...ZeroSlip & Direct-mount, made in the USA.
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I listened to this last night, and holy hell is this embarrassing for everyone involved. It sounds like a classic business disagreement over a contractual relationship that one party sought to exit for reasons that really did not have all that much to do with the equipment. And all this was unfortunately aired out in the press. Delaney sounds like a big fucking baby. Maybe Vroomen and 3T didn't hold up their end of the bargain, it's hard to tell, but Vroomen's response is much less emotional

^^^This. Also, MTB already has several levels/options of 12-speed, vs primarily 11-speed for road. Every added cog makes a difference.

For every 100g of additional weight, how much time do you think you are losing due to that additional weight over 40K? Again, basically knowable.

Di2stats.com

The cogs on the Rotor group have the same spacing as 12 speed and use a 12 speed chain. I'm not sure exactly how the Rotor freehub and cassette compatibility work, but I know how the XDR works because I installed that driver body and the 9-32 cassette yesterday on my TT bike. These cassettes typically have a 2 piece construction, where one part sits on the freehub body and the other twists clockwise to lock in. The ethirteen cassette for mountain biking (9-46), which is what I run on my XC bike now that I'm slow, works the exact same way in terms of how it installs. It's kind of hard to describe, so here's a picture. If you didn't use that 1.7mm spacer, you could easily fit 12 speeds there.

10-15 sec/kg for the worlds course this year, so 1-1.5 sec per 100g. Another matter is that the heavier the cassette (especially if it has big cogs) the more likely you are to get chain slap on the upper chain span as the cassette continues to turn when you stop pedalling. I believe this makes you more likely to drop the chain on a 1x setup.

I don't need light wide-range cassettes on 95% of the TT courses I ride - the last TT I rode with a 11-25 Ultegra cassette. For unknown reasons they like to throw in mountains on worlds TT courses these years, so there you have the last 5%.

Thanks. Might try and throw in a couple of files tonight.

You would think either SRAM or Shimano would have someone who is business savvy enough to understand that cornering the market on a freehub body for the 1x world is a way to sell a lot of wheels and an opportunity to own additional market share in drivetrains more broadly. I think I have bought something like six XD driver bodies as I have slowly moved every bike over to the standard that allows me to run proper gearing on 1x setups. And then I've bought the 10-42 from SRAM, even as I run Di2 on every bike.

The slowness of these companies to adapt and offer new products are missed opportunities both in the product space and in business. Shimano just now released a competing freehub body and their wheels absolutely suck. I don't think they have much chance of catching up to SRAM now.

While I agree that there were some issues of education / understanding with the team (i.e. running a 50t chainring in all but rare extreme cases with a 10t cog), the larger issue is that there isn't enough standardization in terms of cassette options for a given small cog size. If you can stick to one small cog size, that eliminates the need for more frequent chainring or crank swaps.

It seems like this was the root of their mechanics' woes - and I think that SRAM needs to address this if they want even more 1x acceptance in road. If you want small cog jumps, you need a standard cassette body and large chainring (11-25, 11-28, 11-32, 11-36 with a 50-53t ring). If you need lower gears than that, you have to go to their 10-42... with a larger bottom AND top end... so you need a different chainring size (note, I think SRAM has one low-end/heavy 11-42). And then when you do the 9-32, it's a different chainring again. In order to make this thing easy, they need to add options like 11-42, 10-36, 10-32, 10-28, 9-28, 9-36, etc. Now that Shimano made a new cassette body for their 12-speed XTR that supports a 10-tooth small cog, I think that the industry should just agree that 10 is THE new small cog, so we can build chainrings and cranks around that in the future.

I also think that part of the reason for their struggles is that the riders were likely trying to have the smallest gear jumps from cog-to-cog for every single stage. With 2x, there are probably days where riders don't use several of the gear combinations at all, but that's a "who cares" situation. The gears are there if they need them (i.e. bad day), but if they don't use them it's no big deal and they still enjoy small gear jumps in the cassette compared to 1x.

I don't have a dog in the fight - that's just my assessment of the situation.

I agree with everything you said -- we are saying a lot of the same things. But my dog in this fight is a better drivetrain experience.

You make a very compelling argument for 1x on the road, and in terms of range a 9-32 covers all the bases. No argument here.

However, given what we know about friction in the small gears, how does that make sense on a TT bike? Surely, in the world of treated chains and every-watt-counts, throwing a bunch of those watts away in the 9T cog seems stupid.

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ZONE3 - We Last Longer

That was absolutely fantastic. Thank you Greg.

I'm not here to advocate 1x for road bikes, pro tours, etc. I was just miffed why paid mechanics were whining so much publicly about doing their job. Maybe it's the Midwest in me, but whining about your job seems like a great way not to have one. I know there's a lot to do for a pro mechanic, but I feel that going down to one derailleur, having mostly maintenance free brakes and ditching tubulars had to have given them back a bit of time. Having less to do than your peers and then whining about additional 3-5 minute tasks (which certainly add up when given many bikes) seemed off when their baseline should have been lower to begin with.

I love working on cars. I tend to keep cars a long time because I like to work on them and use my saved money towards bikes. If I had been given an electric car a few years back, I would have saved quite a bit of time this summer not flushing the cooling system, replacing spark plugs, changing oil, dropping the transmission pan, scrubbing the intake, replacing the water pump and replacing some other parts in the cooling system. I still would have had to replace the front brakes and wheel bearings, but I would not have used the hours of time saved to whine about accelerated tire wear or having to plug the car in every couple days. Or whatever it is fancy people with electric cars have to do differently.

I absolutely agree with your statement that a bit better standardization of cassettes would help. Settling on an 11, 10 or 9 as the smallest cassette ring should help with the 'top end' confusion which would affect chainring selection.

tessar wrote:

However, given what we know about friction in the small gears, how does that make sense on a TT bike? Surely, in the world of treated chains and every-watt-counts, throwing a bunch of those watts away in the 9T cog seems stupid.

I think this depends a lot on the course and how powerful you are as a rider. I'm not going 50k/hour unless the road is sloping pretty significantly downhill, but I'm not MTM or even rappstar, who has a cadence in the high 70s and an FT close to 5 W/kg. Most of us aren't

Consider Mont Tremblant, a triathlon bike course that I would say requires more 52-11 than almost any other on account of long, straight downhills that are, with the exception of the Duplessis descent in sections, as non technical as they come. My data looks like this for a training ride on that course -- note that the cassette is wrong, and I was actually running 11-28. I can't see how to correct it, but basically you have to translate

11-25: 11-12-13-14-15-16-17-19-21-23-25
11-28: 11-12-13-14-15-17-19-21-23-25-28

16 minutes in the 52-11 over 5 hours (38 mph avg). Compare that to time in 52-15 and 52-17 (listed as 52-16 in the data), the top two gears by time and the exact middle of the cassette. I spent over a quarter of the ride there, or about 75 minutes.

I don't really know how much we know about friction in 9T and 10T. How much is it, and what does it mean in that 16 minutes or so, which is the maximum I could expect to spend as a share of 5 hours due to the nature of that course

In Cambridge Maryland over 56 or 112 miles, I wouldn't see the 9T or 10T at all in a 1x setup, and I wouldn't see the 52-11 in a 2x setup. The little ring would also be useless there. So for a big race like that on a flat course I would probably go with like 46T and an 11-25 or something. I don't know, I'd have to think about it in terms of balancing aero of the drivetrain, chainline, and gaps that you'd be especially sensitive to in a very steady TT on a flat course. Pretty sure the chainline would be just fine, because I'd average about 24 mph with little variance over the day, which is the speed I averaged for 52-17 on Tremblant's course. And 46/15 = 52/17.

All this stuff matters, because every watt counts, I just see a lot of people pontificating about this shit when the data just doesn't support what is said.

It is. I'm a nobody and could knock out those 18 bike's chainring swaps in under an hour though if I didn't have to dig through the parts bin for everything each time. It 'seems' like if you have two bikes, maybe the 'spare' bike could have one size chainring and the main bike another? Just strange how much focus was given on chainrings when it's SUCH a simple job for a SRAM ring mounted on the outside of the spider and front derailleur. I don't remember what cranks they were running, so it might even be quicker if they had enough extra cranks and could just pull those instead.

I'm not here to advocate for 1x on road bikes, pro tours, etc. It seems clear that that management and generally toxicity among the team probably had more to do with the team folding than technical problems. Them trying to blame their parts/bikes has created a divisive attitude in this thread. I think most of us would agree that 1x isn't ideal for all of their events, but it didn't make them impossible. Wrenching should not have been wildly different. If I was given a set of parameters to operate within (here's your cassettes, here's your chainrings, no front derailleurs, here's your paycheck), I would figure out what worked best within the parameters. Maybe smaller chainrings and cassette teeth are just too different for riders and team managers and that makes the mechanic's job even more difficult. Greg Kopecky makes an excellent point about the small tooth on the cassette needing to be standardized to help with the chainring shuffling to keep top end availability.

I think you had mentioned somewhere else that you like the SRAM 11-28. Personally, the SRAM 11-28 is my favorite cassette ever. I run it 2x on the road and 1x on the tri bike unless I have a race where 50 x 28 won't cut it. I am a little slower than you and need that 15 and 16 back there. Then it's back to 2x. One event per year where I need 11-32 or 11-34 and 2x. I can't imagine using a 10 x 42 on the road. Even the 11 speed 11-40 on my gravel bike can occasionally leave a little jumpiness between the 11, 13 and 15. 10, 12, 14 would be even (slightly) worse.

You are completely missing my point. Running out of gears is never something that I am concerned with. I just set a national age group record for 40km on a fixed gear 54x14 which isn't particularly large. I AM concered about the jumps between gears. I can't count the number of times I've been in races back in the day with 7, 8, 9, and 10 speed groups where I was in a small group where I found myself in the situation where the 15 was slightly too big and the 17 was slightly too small. And that gap is much smaller than the gaps in the 1x setup I mentioned earlier. Why would I want to switch to a group that gives me back those big jumps between gears now that I've finally mostly left them behind with 11 speed 2x groups?

Maybe 13 speed 1x will solve all of our problems, but one small company selling that group is a long way from being mainstream which means for now 1x is not viable for road racing. And road racing is the context of this discussion Re: Aqua Blue.

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Kevin

http://kevinmetcalfe.dreamhosters.com
My Strava

They need to do both bikes because if you need a bike change you want a bike with appropriate gears for that particular stage. Given that we are talking about professional bike racing where money, sponsorship, etc. is on the line having suboptimal gearing to make the mechanics job easier is not an option.

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Kevin

http://kevinmetcalfe.dreamhosters.com
My Strava