Yes, compact bar, sorry for not being clear.

In this picture the red bike has compact bars, the black the regular crit bend bars (round, considered shallow drop back in the day). I have the 14 cm stem on the red bike but no real extra drop. You can see how much higher the drops are relative to the front wheel. Geometry on the two frames are the same.


In this picture I'm comparing the FSA Energy bar (15 cm drop) to the FSA Wing Compact (12 cm drop). You can see that even though the Energy bar has more drop the effective drop at the meat of the curve is significantly less. I bought the Energy bar thinking it would solve the problem but it didn't, the drop was the wrong angle for me and it wasn't as low as I wanted.


The reason for the 3 cm stem drop - you can see that based on my preferred drop position the tops were much lower. 3 cm.


The compact bars work well for certain situations but fitting such a bar on a bike that had a regular bar on it originally will bring your weight back a bit. It may not be a good thing. I chose to pursue the compact bar (it's been a multi year process) because they're available and they're significantly stiffer than the old bars I've been using. The Mavic 315 bar I bought in 1997 when Mavic was closing out their component stuff. The 3ttt Gimondi bars I bought even earlier - they were unavailable by 1997 hence my purchase of the heavier, non-heat treated Mavic bar. The FSA Compact bar was so much better that I made the effort to make them work.