Originally Posted by pocky

+1
Think hard about this. Are you sure you really want a drop-bar road bike?


+1000

Something that nobody seems to have mentioned: I believe your fork is a Rock Shox SID Team, so it's got a lockout. Make sure it's locked out -- that's going to make a huge performance difference. Ideally, you'd grab a rigid fork with disc mounts, like this one for fifty bucks.

You did the right thing in going with the 1.1" slicks -- make sure they're pumped up to their absolute maximum PSI.

A cassette with closer spacing on the high range of the gears will be an extremely easy and inexpensive swap-in that will give you some more smoothness in the gear range you care about, but your highest gear in the back is already an 11, so I suspect you'll get a bigger performance boost out of bigger chainrings. I suspect I'd be topping out in the 46/11 combination a lot with your setup -- are you finding you're always topping out and wish you had several higher gears? It can get expensive to go down this path because if you go too big you'll find your FD is the wrong shape, so if you're not topping out, don't mess with this part yet.



Your bike is not crap, or some downhill behemoth -- it's a recently-made aluminum XC bike with XT and XTR components. This is a nice bike, and there's no reason a carefully set-up mountain bike can't be fast on the road. I am certain that your bike, set up properly, will keep you quite a bit faster than a poorly-selected CraigsList road bike with a hi-ten frame, straight-rimmed steel wheels, 60psi tires, and a poor fit. Heck, it might even keep you faster than a reasonably well-selected non-CraigsList road bike!

That being said, it's a nice enough mountain machine that I agree you should eventually purchase another bike and return this one to trail duty!