book reviews

..........................................................................................................................................................................................................

possibly losing the plot?

in the current issue of rouleur magazine rohan dubash of dauphin cycles questions the wisdom of campagnolo's design team in having taken the perfect design of the original quick release skewer and made it ergonomically and aesthetically worse in order to save 12 grams. well, it looks like they paid no heed and are hell bent on making matters worse.

photos of campag's 2007 flagship record groupset have emerged and it seems that the beautiful design for which they have always been justly renowned, has been chucked in the bin, presumably in the name of progress. a few epistles back, i displayed pics of the updated chainset and hollow bottom bracket design that will replace everything in the range for 2007 and queried the reason behind the change. this finally sees campag follow all the other sheep and place the bearings outboard of the bottom bracket shell, allowing larger bearing area and a whopping bottom bracket spindle. and for why? has anyone actually experienced massive deflection using the perfectly serviceable square taper? doesn't seem to bother tom none.

however, the new carbon crank (right) that uses this technology has now been revealed to all, and stylish isn't a word i would be using to describe it. boxy might be an appropriate epithet. i have always delighted in the record alloy chainset (photo top) which seemed to have been sculpted from the alloy employed in its manufacture, and the use of the crank arm as the fifth chainring spider just confirmed the design excellence of the campagnolo we knew and loved. and if memory serves well enough, the first carbon chainset (below) from vicenza employed the same sense of style in woven carbon.

then we hit trouble. the current carbon chainset (below) sports 'multi directional' carbon which is never as aesthetically pleasing as the woven black stuff, (look closely at saunier duval's scott bikes - yuk) and the sleek spider has given way to functional carbon - still 'multi-directional'. the 2007 offering has definitely gone boxy. yes it still has that crank/spider combination but now it has almost objectional and unnecessary graphics and it's not cool.

one wonders if this is the real reason that boonen still rides alloy in preference to the current carbon offering - that style and function wins over form and function. and unfortunately, vicenza's design people haven't stopped there. the new brake calipers, which appear to be the same style throughout the 2007 range, have had whopping chunks of alloy machined out the arms (picture, bottom right) in the name of weight loss. thewashingmachinepost colnago is currently stopped by a pair of chorus differential calipers, but i have always fawned over a set of similar record calipers (below left) due to their more exotic finish and had half expected the 2007 offering to be of similar design but in carbon. boy was i wrong.

what does it matter? well, in terms of function it probably matters not one whit - if the new stuff is more rigid and lighter, well isn't that what we all want?

no, not really.

if style mattered not at all then rapha wouldn't keep selling out of stuff, there wouldn't be a website and ideology called campyonly.com and we probably wouldn't all be clammering for italian bikes (well some of us at least). cycling is a stylish sport, a stylish 'hobby', in fact just plain stylish (has anyone ever noticed that those last two words are a contradiction?) and i'd like it to progress stylishly - not the reverse (don't get me started on that sram stuff).

if anyone from campagnolo's design department happens to be reading this (we all have to slum it sometime), please go and look in the company archives (heck, i've got some 1990s catalogues i could lend you) and remind yourselves of the beautiful stuff you used to give us, and please start doing it again. before you end up as a clone of ssshhhh, you know who.

the one saving grace is that nothing could look as bad as a dura ace chainset.

and in case you're desperate to get your hands on the new ultra torque as soon as you can, check rullobike's website. veloce and centaur available now (and centaur now has the carbon parallelogram on the rear mech and carbon levers just like 2006 chorus and record.)

this website is named after graeme obree's championship winning 'old faithful' built using bits from a defunct washing machine

as always, if you have any comments on this nonsense, please feel free to e-mail and thanks for reading.

this column appears, as regular as clockwork on this website every two weeks. (ok so i lied) sometimes there are bits added in between times, but it all adds to the excitement.