Drop bars – why?

Not being faceitious, but can I run flat bars? And if I can, why do people run drops? Seems to me that I’d be better on a flat bar and have a larger choice of brakes and less complicated shifters etc?

Them’s the rules.

Drop bars – because it’s winter training for roadies.

If you use flat bars beware no barends rule and possibly width limit (something like 520mm, certainly something like that for the 3peaks).

You can run flat bars (or an MTB for that matter) in most races.
You can’t in the 3 peaks or UCI ranked races such as the national trophy series.

Drop the mountainbikers way of thinking first of all. Then just think about going as fast as possible and not about what’s going to make you stop better.
STIs aren’t complicated at all, they have uppy and downy levers same as mountainbikes only you don’t need seperate brake levers as well.

Are we talking about racing here, or just riding off road on a ‘cross bike?

If racing, I know (regardless of da roolz) that I’d much rather be on drops due to much greater range of hand positions. Perhaps for techy stuff (which you don’t get in many/any UK cx races, bar the 3PKS) flat bars are better and offer more control.

More brake options? Yes if you are running discs. But again for cx racing I wouldn’t bother. Cantis are fine for the (one average) two times a lap you’ll need to touch the brakes.

Just out of interest, are used to drop bars at all or from a totally MTB background?

Nick Craig raced the three peaks last year on flat bars.

For bog standard cross races, I’d far rather be using drop bars for speed and flexibility.

I ride more road than MTB, though over the course of my life I’ve ridden a lot more MTB if that makes sense.

I have a junk road bike that’s coming to the end of it’s useful life, it’s had a bonded joint fail and be welded and been crashed so has a bent mech hanger that I can’t get any straighter, it’s heavy and looks horific and is a size too big. But it does the job. Plan is to get something flash next spring to replace it with and keep it as a winter hack.

But I figured that I might as well pick up a cheap frame on ebay so at least my winter hack has gears that work and is the right size. Then I noticed that there’s lots of cyclocross races around here and I’d probably want to do them over the winter, so wondered about running a cyclo-cross bike as my winter bike.

Then I looked at these:

http://www.chainreactioncycles.com/Models.aspx?ModelID=43322

http://www.chainreactioncycles.com/Models.aspx?ModelID=18196

I don’t want to spend a lot of money on it. I can swap everything over apart from the brakes and I could keep the front brake if I kept the forks I’ve got on it, so it would be fairly adaptable. I think I’d prefer to run disk brakes than cyclo-cross type brakes and I’m not sure cable discs are any good? They certainly weren’t last time I encountered some! Would cable discs work with my Ultegra STIs?

So if I ran hydraulics I’d need flat bars, then I wondered why people don’t run flat bars as I’d imagine I’d prefer that. But then I thought I was probably wrong, but couldn’t work out why.

So there’s my thought process! Please feel free to advise or go off at wild tangents.

Brakes….you don’t want to be slowing down.

Some courses are going to be long and draggy, you’ll want drops so you can tuck up and get out of the wind.

They are out from Peaks again. No harm either.

drops are better for descending. low centred body position and much more difficult to go otb – due bent elbows and bodyweight acting perpendicular to steerer instead of parallel.

Run what you like, no-one will care. Cross is the last branch of cycle sport where people still turn up on whatever they’ve cobbled together from the parts bin.

As mentioned above, below UCI-level races or the 3 peaks you can ride pretty much anything.

Plenty of really good cable disks will work with standard drop levers.
BB5’s, BB7’s, Tektro Lyra. Shimano do some too. Tektro have been the best for me so far.

Pompino with a BB7

pompino 1 by Jon Wyatt, on Flickr

day-one with Lyra’s.

Genesis Day-one by Jon Wyatt, on Flickr

If drops are better for descending, why don’t mountain bikes have drops? Sorry, I’ll need to be convinced as to why a cyclocross bike would descend better on drops?

I guess my concern is really whether CX brakes will scare me to death descending off Windgather in the wet as I’ll be using the bike as a winter road bike too. If so I’d rather have discs, but that limits me to spending a fortune, running cable discs. Mind you, I’ll only be able to run a front disc, so I’m probably looking at keeping the drops and running CX brakes before swapping to cable disc at the front if I can’t slow down on long wet descents.

thomthumb – Member
drops are better for descending. low centred body position and much more difficult to go otb – due bent elbows and bodyweight acting perpendicular to steerer instead of parallel.

Eh? that sounds like total gibberish! Lower body position, yes, but that also typically means weight further forward and more weight on the front wheel neither of which are going to help avoid otb.

bodyweight perpendicular rather than parallel?

Forget the 3 Peaks, that’s nothing like regular Sunday cross.
IME there’s hardly any descent in a cross race, that might be different up your way though.
And again IME there’s not been a time I’ve ever felt under braked during a CX race.

I have been using mine as my club bike after the season. The brakes aren’t as good as good road dual pivots, but just as good as what I spent decades before riding.

Edit; Most courses nowadays have fast sections where you’d natuarally want to be in the drops i.e path, circuit, road, dry flat feild.

FWIW I have drops on mine (better all round for all the riding I do on my CX bike) but use v-brakes with travel adapters which give me plenty of braking unlike the cantis I had before (and, yes, I do know how to set cantis up but they’re simply not a patch on Vs).

CX racing – powerful braking not really required – just enough to regulate speed.

Other riding (which is what I use mine for) – just like mtbs, good brakes will allow you to ride faster/better/with more confidence.

What are these adaptors of which you speak?

These: http://www.tritoncycles.co.uk/m13b185s162p6174/PROBLEM_SOLVERS_TRAVEL_AGENT/RS_GB/15479

You can find them cheaper if you look around here/ebay/etc

Basically they let you use mtb v-brakes with road levers.

total gibberish!

possibly!

what i mean is if you hit something, lets say a small log, that wants to send you over the bars. if you are on the flats your body weight pitching forward will act downwards, in front of, and almost parallel to the headtube, helping you go otb.

if you are in the drops your body weight will act in a direction more paralel with your toptube, your elbows suck it up and you will roll over the log.

is that clearer? may still be nonsense but hopefully you can follow it now!! 😆

They have drops because they’re cyclocross bikes. HTH

I understand what you think but I respectfully say that you’re wrong 🙂

Lower position is an advantage in itself (since your weight is acting with less leverage over the front axle) but it has disadvantages which outweigh it – more weight further forward which makes it more likely to endo and go otb. People use the drops on cx bikes to get better braking and a more secure grip on the bars!

i reckon if you hit a log on the drops you’re probably more likely to flip over, but that’s just a feeling (and i’ve certainly flipped over plenty on the hoods too)

however in my very limited (2 races) cx experience, there are not normally logs on the down bits. all my falling was at muddy corners

If you’re on the drops you can exert more force on the brake levers than if you are on the hoods, although it feels better descending on the hoods if you are used to mtb’s. My day one has tektro mini vee’s which have no adjustment but are plenty powerful enough.

Just had a peek at some images from cross in my league. All the pointy down bits seem to be taken in the hoods. Though these aren’t hills, but things like old grassed over air raid shelters and roadside embankments very steep but very short.
Anything resembling a climb gets muddy or greasy so gets taken on the hoods.

Just MTFU and ride drops and crappy brakes, it will make you more of a man

Do all my descending on the 3 Peaks in the drops, main reason – death grip on the brakes gives better braking force, I also find I can absorb the shocks better through my arms/elbows than riding on the hoods, and lower centre of gravity to avoid OTB (except that bit on Simon Fell where my front wheel sank to the axle in a peat trough, and that wasn’t even descending…).

i ride in the drops, it’s fine. come from a mtb background so was weird at first. just a different way of doing things that’s all. most cx courses aren’t exactly like riding down the mega track so you don’t need 3feet wide risers and 200mm discs really (well unless you really need every bit of help you can get to stay upright)

Yeah, ok. Like I say, I’m not really bothered about racing, I just don’t want crappy brakes when i’m riding it on the roads when it’s greasy etc. There’s some big hills around here where a chap can get himself into trouble if he isn’t careful.

Think I’ll get the disc forks, then run CX brakes and eventually put a cable disc on the front.

So is there anything betterer for similar money than the Kinesis I linked to above?

What about this:

http://www.chainreactioncycles.com/Models.aspx?ModelID=53014

I think people here are thinking about cyclocross bikes as a trendy bike to mountain bike on. If you want to ride terrain that suits mountain bikes then ride a mountain bike. Cross bikes are great at what they are designed at. You don’t need powerful brakes, you can stop pedalling and you soon slow down. Drops allow you to get a road like position for speed. You don’t need masses of control and worry about hitting logs because you can jump off and carry it over logs.

By ‘people’ do you mean me? I want to be able to do Cyclo Cross races on it and use it on the road in the winter, hence wanting decent brakes on it. I’m not bothered about having decent brakes for racing as if everyone else can do it without dieing, I’m sure I can too. However, decent brakes on the road is an important consideration.

You’ll be fine with standard cantis on the road if you set them up properly. I used one of my old cross bikes for winter training duty with Frogglegs for a couple of years, no problems going down the hills in the Peak District.

There does seem to be a tendency at the moment (not necessarily by the OP) to want to use cyclocross bikes for things they just aren’t meant for.

Properly set up cantis are decent brakes.

Can you get a ride on a cx bike with cantis? That’d tell you how you feel about them. They seem roughly comparable with my road bike brakes to me (road bike is old with regular single-pivot brakes).

Half the fun is using them for things they aren’t meant for surely? I’ve ridden a 4x track, run up hills, done road loops and been down an abandoned DH track in the last few days.

Would you ride a road race on a dh bike ‘for fun’? 🙂

I’ve used cantis on a friends cross bike, I’ve even set them up perfectly on the bike so they worked as well as they could. They weren’t anywhere near as good as the brakes on my road bike. Let’s not try to pretend they’re something they’re not eh? They didn’t invent twin pivot road brakes for fun did they!

I do wonder how those fully-laden canti-equipped touring bikes used to make it up and down dale without anybody dying 🙄

Slowly that’s how! Is it wrong to want better? Sure it’s possible, I’ve done it myself, but it’s not as good. Which is entirely my point.

I’ve used cantis on a friends cross bike, I’ve even set them up perfectly on the bike so they worked as well as they could. They weren’t anywhere near as good as the brakes on my road bike. Let’s not try to pretend they’re something they’re not eh?

You’ve answered your own question then.

Cross is the last branch of cycle sport where people still turn up on whatever they’ve cobbled together from the parts bin

Just extending that to ‘turn up to whatever trail’. I’m all about having fun me, sometimes that’s about having an opportunistic go at something on the wrong bike. Not looking for a medal or anything.

No, by people I mean the general feeling and talk in this thread and others.
Canti brakes are fine, we used to use them on mountain bikes which are far heavier. I commute on a cross bike and the Cantis work ok for me. I chase down buses and can follow close at 50kph and they’ll stop me quick enough to not run into the back of the bus when needed. I would like discs but there just aren’t really the products available and wheel compatibility would be an issue. I certainly wouldn’t want to use flat bars just to use discs.