I'm okay with that, because for me, riding a bike isn't an exercise in physics, it's about fun. Which is a psychological effect of low weight, along with a placebo effect of free speed.

Imagine for a moment, we develop some mad next-level scifi tech where we can create all the physical relationships of a bike without using any matter. I dunno, zero-point energy or some crap, doesn't matter.


Now, imagine how it'd feel to ride that bike.

BTW, now that I look at it in that light, I'm sure I'd love the feeling of super-tight ratios so much, having to shift more often would feel like a good thing.

Oh yeah, in the code I wrote, a long-press would change shifting modes - the chain would shift like a normal triple; once off the small ring it'd run through the ratios on the 50, only shifting to the 52 if you wanted top gear.

It'd be interesting if a competitive cyclist got it in their head it'd be a good move to lace up a boat anchor like a Deep V on the back, and see what it did for PBs...

As for where the weight is, IMO that's a pretty big deal for feel; I reckon a 2kg heavier bike could feel snappier than a lighter one, if the lighter bike had the weight in all the wrong places.

My first couple of road bikes BITD were 27x1.25; the second one was half okay (hi-ten, 6s Accushift). First thing I did to it was throw on a pair of pretty sweet tubulars... Night and day. Suddenly the thing was a total weapon! Never felt such a big difference from a single upgrade, it was incredible.

I'd say in order of importance: tyres/tubes, rims (I suspect hubs and drivetrain move slow enough to be considered static), and then you've got the mass hanging off the headset, the mass felt when you pop up the front wheel over obstacles, and the mass swinging side to side when you stand on it, so I guess the list continues something like: levers, bars, stem, seat, seatpost, fork, front hub kinda thing.

There was a guy on ST who actually made a custom super-heavy rear wheel a decade ago or so. He had a bunch of other "odd" ideas as well, including sticking a gallon jug from orange juice on his aerobars with a straw and whatever he was drinking. I think he even put water in his rear inner tube. He had a great bike split and DNFed the run and considered that vindication.

What does water in your tubes feel like, besides soft and sloshy?

By the way has anybody else done the math on this one? I keep coming up with 1x13 < 2x11. Every time.

1x13 ~ 2x8, potentially.

Claims by 1x drivetrain manufacturers about how many gears a given 2x/3x drivetrain is equivalent to are generally rubbish.

This is from Rotor's 1x13 Road drivetrain page:



While it's certainly possible to concoct a 2x11 drivetrain for which this is true, it is certainly not the norm.

Consider the extremely common Shimano 50-34 11-28.
Just about the simplest shift pattern for a double is to treat it like a 1x-plus-bailout. If you do this, there are four gears in the small chainring that are considerably lower than the 11 gears of the big ring. So instead of needing multiple front shifts to create a 14-gear sequence, you actually need only one front shift to enjoy an 11+4 = 15 gear sequence.
If you do the same thing but with the small ring as your primary ring - which lots of slower riders do - you have the 11 gears of the small ring plus 5 additional gears in the big ring. We're now up to a 16-gear sequence, still with just one front shift.
If we allow for multiple front shifts - which rotor claims is required to merely get to 14 unique useful ratios - we can easily get to 17 unique useful ratios, by using the 50-23 to split the large jump between the 34-15 and 34-17.

By using a tighter cassette, this situation gets even easier. A 50-34 paired to a 12-25 cassette, for instance, gives 16 ratios with the simple 1x-plus-bailout shifting approach.

They make the same kind of stuff up with older drivetrains, too. Standard practice among marketing people who don't understand gearing seems to be that an extra chainring adds around 30% to the number of gears. For instance, when 1x12 was rolling out, I remember someone claiming that 2x6=8.
I've heard people claim that 3x8=13, but the 3x8 on my gravel bikes gives me about 18.

But never fear...
...Rotor ran some focus group cadence data through a woodchipper and they're confident that all our needs are covered!

I assume it feels bad, because it doesn't compress. The guy wasn't the best at communicating though, in not the biggest surprise in the world.

I found that 2x10 was equivalent to 1x12-18 with narrow crank x wide cassette at one extreme and wide crank x narrow cassette at the other; noting few people would run either.

You could run 46–36 x 11-13-15-17-19-21-23-26-30-34 where only 46 x 11–13 and 36 x 30-34 don’t overlap for 12.

You could run 50–34 x 14–15–16–17–18–19–20–21–22–23 where only 50 x 18–23 and 34 x 13-15 overlap for 18.

Here's a graph of how my half-step ratios affect rpm compared to a standard double