What If He Hadn't Lost That Race?

A couple of days ago, we got a snowstorm that lived up to its advanced billing. Now it's raining, sleeting and snowing at the same time.  The way things are going, the streets will be turned from sledding runs to skating rinks.

The weather's got me to thinking about a story many of you know.   Back in 1927, a certain rider was leading a race in the Dolomites.  In those days, racers usually rode "flip-flop" rear hubs with a different-sized cog on each side.  The fellow was halfway up the notorious Croce d'Aune when he stopped to "flip" his wheel and access his lower gear.  

His fingers frozen, he couldn't loosen the wingnuts holding his wheel in place.  Supposedly, he muttered "Bisogna cambiar qualcossa de drio"--something has to change on the back of the bike--before he finally got the wheel loose.  Meantime, he lost time and his lead.

Now, I am sure this story, like most that are apocryphal, has been embellished or cleaned up, or both.  After all, any invention that changes the world (or the world of cycling, anyway) should have a good story behind it, right?

Well, that tale is widely accepted as the "creation myth", if you will, of the quick release lever.  The racer/inventor in question is, of course, one Tullio Campagnolo.

Not surprisingly, he was at work improving--you guessed it!--the wing nut before, as the folks at Classic Rendezvous so eloquently tell us, "an extremely bad winter" resulted in "Tullio's attention being shifted".

Was a pun intended with the world "shifted"? Signor Campagnolo is also noted, as we all know, for his derailleur designs.  If we can level a criticism against him, it might be that he never managed to make a really good wide-range touring derailleur that did not wholly or partially copy a Japanese design.  

The Gran Turismo is was, in the immortal words of Frank Berto, "Campy's Edsel":  utterly baroque and a functional failure. The first Rally derailleur was, essentially, a Shimano Crane GS built around a Campagnolo Record parallelogram with brass bushings.  (Some believed that Shimano was making it for Campy, but I doubt it.)  It shifted just like a Crane GS, which is to say better than any other European wide-range derailleur of the time, but not quite as well as anything SunTour was making.  

The second generation of Rally was just a Nuovo Record with a long cage.  I never used one, but from all accounts, it didn't shift as well as the first Rally. Moreover, the long cage strained the rest of the derailleur, which meant that the second-generation Rally didn't have the longevity for which Nuovo Records were renowned.  Current Campagnolo wide-range derailleurs are similar in geometry and overall design to those of Shimano.

The "Record Record", on the other hand, elongated the parallelogram in an attempt to avoid what some perceived as the fragility of long-cage derailleurs.  A parallelogram is indeed stronger than a cage, but I never had any long-cage derailleurs that failed as a result of the cage. (My experience includes several SunTour and Shimano models as well as the Huret Duopar and long-cage Jubilee and, for a brief time, a first-generation Rally.)

Here's one more interesting "What if?" component:

Before Campagnolo introduced his side-pull brake in the late 1960's, the Universal Super 51--and its later, shorter-armed iteration, the Super 68--were regarded as the best side-pull brakes.  As they were losing their share of the high-end market, Universal developed their "685", which pulled from both sides.

Supposedly, the force of the brakes squeezed rims the way a pair of vice-grips can crumple a beer can.  Also, the few who used those brakes didn't ride them for very long:  The calipers (the same material, thickness and basic design of the 68s) simply couldn't stand up to the extra torque.  But the final nail in the coffin for those brakes may have been the market:  There were very few sources for the needed "Siamesed" cables.

It's interesting to think of how bikes might be different if today's touring derailleurs and brakes were based on the designs of the "Record Record" and "685", respectively--or if Tullio Campagnolo hadn't such difficulty in loosening a pair of wing nuts during a winter race.

Campagnolo Gran Sport And The Records

The other day, I wrote about the Nivex rear derailleur.  In my post, I mentioned the derailleur that foreclosed Nivex's future: the Campagnolo Gran Sport.

The first GS derailleur looked somewhat like every racing derailleur Campagnolo would make for the next four decades.  Debuted at the 1949 Salon de Milan (That name has a nice ring, doesn't it?), a.k.a., the Milan Bicycle Show, the original Gran Sport had, in embryonic form, the dropped parallelogram we would see on all of Campy's racing derailleurs until the late 1980's.  However, that mechanism had no return spring and was operated by a "double" cable--actually, a cable that looped through the body in the same manner as it did in most French derailleurs of the time.  






No one seems to know whether anything more than a prototype of this derailleur was ever made.  However, a year later, the "double" cable was replaced with a single cable that moves the parallelogram outward or inward, depending on the direction of the shift.  If it wasn't  not the first derailleur to employ such a system, it's almost certainly the first such derailleur to be widely used by racers.  

1951 Gran Sport

 Tullio Campagnolo made various refinements to the derailleur over its manufacturing run, which ended in 1963.  It represented a great improvement in shifting ease over the rod-actuated derailleurs Campagnolo and other companies made before the Gran Sport and the plunger-actuated derailleurs made by Simplex and other companies.  The GS was also mechanically simpler:  no small consideration in races over pockmarked postwar roads and teams with limited budgets.

First generation Record, 1963

The Record, introduced in 1963, looked all but identical to the last version of the Gran Sport.  However, the pulley cage was moved slightly forward and upward in relation to the jockey pulley.  This refinement widened the range of the derailleur and improved the shifting ease somewhat. 

Campagnolo Nuovo Record

Four years after that, one of the most iconic derailleurs of all time--the Campagnolo Nuovo Record--would first see the light of day.  While it didn't offer much technical refinement over the Record, it looked far more refined, in its polished cold-forged aluminum (in contrast to the chrome-plated brass and steel of the Record and Gran Sport).  Campagnolo would make the Nuovo Record--and it would be the most common derailleur in the peloton--until 1985.  A further refinement of the Nuovo Record--the Super Record--would appear in 1974.  As popular as it was, it did not displace the Nuovo Record, with both derailleurs ending their runs at the same time.

Later version  Super Record

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Note:  I would like to acknowledge The Retrogrouch, Bicycle Quarterly, Classic Rendezvous, Disraeli Gears, Velo Base, Classic LIghtweights UK and old Campagnolo literature for the information in this post.