Further to yesterday’s post…
…let’s take a half-assed end-of-the-week look at that now-extinct turn-of-the-century drivetrain configuration, the “road triple:”
Please note that all this is so off the top of my head that it’s borderline fiction, and no doubt at least some of you will quibble with the timeline and historical accuracy. That’s perfectly fine. In fact I’m doing you a favor, since the whole point of bicycle blogs and forums is to provide a place where people who know more than you do get to say, “Well actually…”
So, you’re welcome.
Anyway, as we’ve already established, as the new millennium dawned, cycledom found itself in the throes of a road bike boom the likes of which the world had never seen:
[The LeMond Tete de Course may very well have been the high water mark of Road Bike Mania]
While there’s a common misconception that low gearing for bicycles did not exist in the 1990s and gear-shaming was so extreme that Russ from Path Less Pedaled wasn’t even able leave his house until 2017, certainly mountain bikes, touring bikes, hybrids and the like all came equipped with triple-chainring cranks. However, it is true that higher-end road racing bikes did not come with triples, because…they were for racing, and GENERALLY SPEAKING a bicycle racer didn’t have much use for a triple. Sure, then as now plenty of non-racers bought racing bikes anyway and dealt with the gearing, but like ordering a stiff drink or contorting your portly middle-aged body into a Porsche 911 (or ordering a stiff drink or three and then contorting your portly middle-aged body into a Porsche, which was still socially acceptable back then) they knew what they were getting into and they paid the price.
However, by the late 1990s road cycling had become so overrun by the hordes of the hairy-legged that the industry had no choice but to provide them with bikes they could actually pedal, and by the end of the decade you could choose between a double and triple when purchasing your Corporate Road Bike:
Still, if you wanted a bike with Dura-Ace or Record that was only available in a double, because who would want a super high-end racing bike with a triple drivetrain? That’s would have been like ordering that Porsche 911 with an automatic transmission!
But convenience always wins over purity, and eventually both Campagnolo and Shimano offered their top-level racing components in a triple configuration. I don’t remember who came first, but by around 2002 there was a three-ring version of Dura-Ace:
[Photo borrowed from here, I’ll give it back, I promise]
And of Record:
[From here]
Though the copywriters still had to be mindful of the tender egos of customers. Campagnolo for example positioned the triple as an adornment for “the most sophisticated bicycles:”
And if anyone dared look askance at your triple you’d remind them BUT THE PROS USE THEM ON THE ANGLIRU:
Yet two years later the stigma clearly had not vanished completely:
[From here]
And even Campagnolo’s catalog copy for the more accessible Centaur was highly defensive:
I 100% guarantee that whoever wrote that would not have been caught dead on a triple.
But what of the mechanical differences between Shimano and Campagnolo when it came to triples? (Remember: SRAM had not entered the road bicycle drivetrain market yet.) Well, Campagnolo had an inherent advantage due to their superior front shifting technology:
[Leave your “Actually that’s a rear shifter” comment below.]
Campagnolo shifters of that era worked with both double and triple front chainrings; furthermore, because there were lots of little “detents” (I guess you’d call them) in the shifting action (people compare it to friction) you could really finesse and trim those front shifts.
On the other hand, Shimano front shifters had to be dedicated double or triple units, because the idea that a rider should have to use any skill whatsoever in order to shift was antithetical to the post-STI Shimano philosophy. Furthermore, Shimano double front shifters were already finicky to set up, so the addition of a third chainring increased the Fuss Factor by 50%. The flipside of this was that Shimano had a considerable advantage over Campagnolo in the low-gearing-for-road-bikes department because they had a full line of mountain bike stuff that was often compatible with the road stuff, whereas Campagnolo had no mountain bike stuff by now, and no derailleur that was rated for more than a 29-tooth cog [intern: fact check that]. But home-curated hodgepodge drivetrains do not sustain the bicycle industry, and whether it’s a Dura-Ace triple instead of an XTR rear derailleur and cassette, or a GRX gravel drivetrain instead of…an XTR rear derailleur and cassette, off-label use and mainstream sales are not compatible.
Also, consider your older cyclist of means. You know, the one who can’t decide between crabon and titanium. What do you do if you want that customer? You sell him a bike made out of both:
The same logic applied to drivetrains. Do you make this discriminating customer sully his new dream bike by sticking a mountain bike derailleur on it, or force him to forfeit full-Record bragging rights by using a “Racing T?” Certainly not! Instead, you offer him a complete high-end drivetrain that’s just the 53/42 he’s been riding for decades, plus the 30-tooth front chainring he now needs for the climbs. Age of excess indeed! Basically, the high-end triple was just a regular Record or Dura-Ace drivetrain with a whole other mini-drivetrain (still not that low by today’s standards) bolted to the side of it. 30 gearing permutations, many of them redundant? Now that’s decadence!
Of course, in retrospect it’s completely unsurprising that the road triple has disappeared. Due to the aforementioned redundancies, it required skill to use efficiently, and as we’ve already established, convenience always wins. So it makes sense that the drivetrain companies eventually figured out how to take the smaller-BCD crank, get the same gear range, and rebrand it as “compact” for roadies–and yes, sure, on balance I’d say everyone was better off for it. Also, before SRAM entered the picture, it was just Shimano and Campagnolo, and they’d compete with more, more, MORE! More cogs, more front chainrings, computers integrated into the shifters… If SRAM hadn’t shown up we’d probably be riding road bikes with 13×4 drivetrains by now. But SRAM could never really get the hang of front shifting, and eventually went the opposite way by killing it entirely.
As for the experience of actually using a road triple, it does require more thought to use, but it is quite decadent. Even now the 130- or 135-BCD crank is part of my muscle memory, and while a compact crank objectively makes more sense, on a skinny-tired racing bike I’d often rather be in a 39 or a 42 rather than having to choose between a 34 or a 50, or a 36 and a 52. So a road triple is nice in that you don’t have to give up what used to be your “small” ring back in the old days, yet you still get an actual small ring when you need it.
But for better or worse, the triple is gone, never to return. And there’s not a chance it will return. Just imagine how quickly a triple front derailleur would drain a battery!