Re: Most significant advance in bike technology for speed?

On 1/24/2025 6:00 PM, Zen Cycle wrote:

On 1/24/2025 2:33 PM, Frank Krygowski wrote:

In another forum, someone postulated that integrated brake & shift levers (like STI) were the most significant bit of racing technology ever designed for increasing speed. But that claim met with little respect. One skeptic noted that there was no great increase in average race speeds in Paris-Roubaix, Milan-San Remo, Tour of Flanders, Leige- Bastogne-Leige or Giro de Lobardia since about 1960, including during the era of STI adoption. By contrast, in the  years 1930 - 1960 average speeds increased around 30%. (Note: That does not mean that STI is not tactically beneficial. That's a separate issue.)

 I'm going to take issue with this claim. The speeds have been showing a steady increase. "Great" increase is somewhat subjective, and taking into account the general "square-law effect" with going faster on a bicycle, a increase of 1MPH from 28 to 29 MPH could indeed be considered a "great" increase over going from 25 to 26 MPH.
 Granted, this has little to do with integrated shifting, my nit is over the claim "there was no great increase in average race speeds....since about 1960"

The discussion I saw had a graph representing the winning speeds over time. I think I've tracked down the website it apparently came from:
https://www.cyclistshub.com/cycling-monuments-statistics/
Lots of data there. (Anyone curious about the winning riders' heights?) The "Cycling Monuments – Average Speed" plot is about a third of the way down. There's lots of scatter, of course; but the plot makes clear that the speed increases after about 1950 were nothing like the speed increases up to 1950.
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- Frank Krygowski