Will 13-speed save 1x on the road?
There may still be a place for 1x in the pro peloton, writes Simon Smythe
“With a 2x11 set-up there are only 14 ratios. 1x13 can pretty much match it gear for gear”
When the Aqua Blue team folded and Adam Blythe angrily blamed the 3T Strada bike, claiming it was “a track bike with gears” saying, “you’re knackered — you can’t ride a one-day race never mind a two-week race,” onlookers assumed that marked the end of the road for 1x road bikes in the professional peloton.
The nail in 1x’s coffin appeared to be the launch of the Strada Due in July, a conventional double-chainring version of the Strada, with the brand’s Gerard Vroomen admitting: “Of course pro riders find themselves in a very specific situation, often going up mountains in a peloton surrounded by 100 riders with no choice but to ride the exact pace of those around them, not their own pace. In such a situation, where they can’t go at their own pace, having that extra gear can be an advantage.”
But do you really have to scrap all the advantages of a 1x system, such as weight saving, better aerodynamics, simplicity, easy adjustment and clean lines, to go back to a conventional set-up? What if you just had more sprockets than the 11 that were at Aqua Blue’s disposal with their SRAM Force1 groupsets?
While 3T appeared to be giving up on 1x, or at least hedging its bets, Rotor, one of Dimension Data’s equipment sponsors this year, unveiled a 1x13 groupset at Eurobike. Although it’s still in its launch phase, the Spanish brand is confident that it’s headed for the pro peloton and revealed to Cycling Weekly that it had already been talking to 3T with regard to the 1x Strada bike.
Rotor engineer Carlos Carton, who led the 1x13 project, said: “With Aqua Blue we have seen that 1x11 is not enough. For that range, the steps in between are too big for these guys. But with 1x13 we can extend the range of ratios to match 2x11 and keep the same steps in between.”
Rotor has demonstrated that with a road-racing 2x11 set-up there are actually
only 14 different ratios. Its 1x13 can match it pretty much gear for gear. In addition Rotor, which has six years of experience of manufacturing power meters, has data to suggest that slighter bigger steps when riders reach the larger sprockets are inconsequential and so 13 is plenty: “For example in our 1x10-36 we have 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 — the same as what they’re used to using. And then we’re opening the steps a little bit but we have seen with our power meter data that at slow speed the cadence range that you can afford biomechanically is bigger. So these bigger steps at the top of the cassette are biomechanically supported.”
As for the technical challenge of fitting in an extra sprocket and maintaining strength and durability, Carton explains: “We kept the 12-speed chain width of 5.3mm and using the wider 142mm OLD with disc brakes we can manage to move the cassette outwards and keep the spacing.”
As Carton indicates, the Rotor 1x13-specific hub is disc only and can’t be used in rim-braking bikes with 130mm rear spacing.
“So we think it should not be so hard for it to be accepted by pro cyclists and the pro peloton. But it would be hard to change minds when they are looking for victories and they are paid for these wins. So they don’t want to use something new or untested. So you have to break these mental barriers.”