Originally Posted by
Chombi1
Strange how these "prototypes" ends up in public hands.
One would think that Campagnolo had strict control on where they end up.
I would have suspected that the company would have destroyed these items once they were done studying/testing them in the field to avoid them ending up in other company's hands or causing liability risks.
A friend of mine worked for Sachs, the car parts division (clutches, dampeners etc.) and had friends in the bike component division, which already was a separate company at that time and was sold to SRAM later. As he was riding a lot and did some pretty extreme stuff, he always was given prototypes to test. No one ever wanted those back and he still had a lot of those parts in his garage, prototype suspension forks, disk brakes etc. I imagine something similar happened at Campagnolo, the interesting bit was the information how the parts performed, the test riders just kept the stuff and it eventually switched hands. I once met a dude who purchased a 1930ish bike at an italian fleamarket which turned out to have a cambio corsa prototype/test version on it.