From Stealth To Flash

Late in the 1970's Bike Boom, black-anodized parts became popular.


Well, some black-anodized parts, anyway:  specifically, chain rings (especially with silver drillium), pedal cages and, to a lesser extent, shift and brake levers, brakes and hubs.  You see, around the time the '70's Bike Boom began, Campagnolo introduced its Super Record gruppo.  It was really the same as the Record gruppo (often mistakenly called the "Nuovo Record" gruppo because its second and most popular iteration included the Nuovo Record rear derailleur, an update of the Record), with a few upgrades.  The silver steel cages on the Record pedals were replaced with black alloy ones on the Super Record; the SR crank had black chainrings and its bottom bracket could be purchased with a titanium spindle and the slotted SR brake levers could be purchased in black. The rear derailleur got black accents and, later, a body with smoother lines and more streamlined graphics.  (Later still, the derailleur could be had with titanium bolts.) As far as I know, the Campy's hubs or brakes of that era were not offered in black.


Ironically, the SR group was actually a few grams heavier than the plain-vanilla Record set because the brake lever handles and chainrings were made with slightly thicker metal to compensate for the drilling and slotting.  Still, aficianados (Italian for "snobs" or "blowhards") associated Super Record with lighter bikes because Eddy and other Tour riders used it.  So, when Shimano and other Japanese makers began to offer their wares in black, it seemed that consumers with more daydreams than money couldn't get enough.


Mind you, those black Japanese parts were perfectly good stuff:  I used some mainly because I thought they looked good on whatever bike(s) I happened to be riding at the time.  But even though some of their parts (e.g., SunTour derailleurs) were arguably better than  their Campy counterparts, the Japanese makers seemed to believe they had to emulate the eminent Italian components maker in order to enhance their image with the (American, anyway) cycling public.


The rage for black bike parts seemed to fade somewhat by the mid-'80's--ironically, as that same color became de rigueur in the couture of that era.  But it picked up again later in the decade and into the '90's, as the "stealth" look became popular. 


It almost seems counterintuitive, really:  Red cars get more speeding tickets than cars of other colors because they are more likely to be monitored for speeding.  But on bikes, tout noir is associated with vitesse and elan.  It's almost as if people believe that bikes that can't be seen will go faster.


But I don't recall any attempt to give the rider a "stealth" appearance--until now, anyway:

From Barn Door Cycling

Here, it's hard to tell where the rider ends and the bike begins.  Will that make him pedal faster?


Now that I've asked that question, I must say that I've always liked the look of Banesto team kit.  In fact, I had one of their jerseys in the team's early days, and it remains one of my favorite bits of graphic design in bicycle racing garments.

Un Mirage, Aujourd'hui Et Hier

If you entered the world of cycling during the 1970's, as I did, you recall certain iconic bikes.  They're not necessarily the high-end ones:  You most likely would have been riding one of those if you had become a cyclist earlier or were wealthy.  I'm thinking, instead, of bikes like the Peugeot U-08, Raleigh Grand Prix and Super Course, Fuji S-10s and Nishiki Olympic and International.  They were the bikes on which many of us learned about cycling:  that is to say, when we went from being kids who banged around on bikes to adolescents and young adults who commuted, trained, raced, toured or were messengers astride two wheels.

Another bike of that genre was the Motobecane Mirage.  I was reminded of that yesterday, when I saw one parked.

Of course, a Mirage from my youth would not have looked like that:  For one thing, red on black, seemingly ubiquitous today, was not quite as common a color scheme.  Even more to the point, one of those old Mirages would not have built in China, or this way:

No, those old bikes would not have had their aluminum frame tubes joined by cobbly welds.  Instead, like most bikes of any quality made at that time, their steel tubes would have been fitted and brazed into lugs.

The result would have been something like this specimen from around 1981:

From Mr. Martin's Website

Like earlier Mirages, this one is constructed from high-carbon steel tubes and lugs.  Though it's one step above entry-level, it had workmanship, a finish and ride better than other bikes in its category. 

Motobecane is said to be the first European bike-maker to equip new bikes with Japanese drivetrain components like the SunTour derailleurs and Sakae Ringyo crankset you see on this bike.  Those components--especially the derailleurs--were significant improvements over the gear found on earlier iterations of the Mirage:

The derailleurs are Huret Allvit:  the same ones found on many entry-level European bikes during the Bike Boom era.  (Schwinn equipped several of its models with rebadged versions of the same derailleurs.) While as advanced when it was introduced in 1958 as the first personal computers were two decades later, they became anachronisms just as quickly.  So did the steel cottered crankse after Japanese companies like Sakae Ringyo (a.k.a. SR) came out with relatively low-priced cotterless cranksets around the same time SunTour introduced its VGT rear derailleur, of which many are still in use nearly two decades after SunTour stopped making derailleurs.

Now, some components on the new black Mirage I saw yesterday are certainly vast improvements over (though not as attractive as) the stuff on the green Mirage--and, some would argue, on the blue one. And even if the new machine is a good rider, somehow I will never be able to see it as a Mirage from my youth. (Pun intended!)

P.S.  I actually owned and rode a Mirage--which was my commuter/beater--for about two years.  It was like the green one in the photo, except that mine was black with purple seat tube and head panels.  I loved the way it looked, and rode.  Sadly, like several of my commuter/beaters, I crashed it.  Or, more precisely, I rode it into one of the deepest potholes in the history of paved roads and cracked the top and seat tubes just behind the head lugs.