In 2006? I bought a CD of all of Campagnolo's US patent applications.
Very interesting reviewing. It has been a while since I reviewed it, but at the time two things struck me.
Campagnolo was working hard all along, I cannot compare thier effort to what Shimano was doing, but they were not just sitting. The problem I saw was that the Suntour patent was going to sunset in a reasonably sort time, even in the early 80's. Campagnolo was designing all around the slant parallelogram, I saw two patents that saw the light of day, the Croce D' Une (sp) actuation rod and the later a/b position operating link angle options.
I have always felt Shimano was playing with the slant parallelogram internally, knowing that the patent would expire at a date certain, then they jumped to market with 7400 SIS very soon thereafter, the tooling was done, the prototyping was done. Just unleash the distribution.
Campagnolo played with electronic shifting really early, maybe the Mavic Zap caught their attention, I have read that they were ready to go then decided they needed an extra cog, setting back the project quite a bit.
Campy was Loking at complete wheels way before they saw release. Some wild stuff.
The 50th group was no real startling engineering effort, some incremental changes, the backside of the cranks get CNC machined to fix the crack prone region, the bulk of the design was in the injection molding tooling for the case...
The Corsa Record... Elegant, it should have become the anniversary group. The Bugatti trim level group.
Maybe it was to be, and was late so they did the 50th version instead?
They learned by the 80th box.