The thing I really love about Mavic is that they never had a good, better, best model line. Not like Campagnolo with Record, Chorus, Victory, etc or Shimano with Dura-Ace, Ultegra, 105 etc. In any given era, for a particular application, Mavic only made one crank, one subset, one deraiileur.

I mean, they made different versions of the 840 RD for road, mountain, etc, and different versions of the crankset for road, track, triple. But there was not a top-level road component and an entry-level road component. There was just one level of Mavic, and it was the best, the same as what the pros rode in the Tour., and the stuff was crazy expensive back in the day .

There was a brief shining period in the 1980s when Mavic was atop the road race world,. Champions rode on Mavic groups. LeMond won half his TdFs and WCs on Mavic (and the other half on Campagnolo). Then Mavic reached for the moon, with a daring, crazy, glorious, disastrous move to electronic shifting, 20 years before its time. That was the beginning of the end, and in a few years Mavic abandoned components altogether and retreated to rims and wheelsets.

I like to imagine a parallel universe, in which Mavic stayed at the top of the heap and, on French frames driven by French legs, continued to win TdFs through the 1990s and 2000s and today. Which is why one of my tout Mavic bikes is going to be fitted with Campagnolo brifters modified with the yellow Mavic logo. A bit of revisionist fantasy trompe d'ceil.