Originally Posted by
T-Mar
Frank Berto of 'The Dancing Chain' fame and who was Bicycling magazine's technical editor, conducted scientific derailleur testing in the early 1980s. He actually measured the over and under shift of derailleurs and converted them to a score. The racing derailleurs were all tested with a maximum 24T cog, which was well within the claimed range of the NGS, NR and SR tested. Campagnolo did not fair well. The only derailleurs rated lower were models from Galli, Roto, Triplex and Zeus. All the Shimano and SunTour derailleurs scored significantly better than Campagnolo, including those which had been around since the late 1970s.
I vaguely remember that. It doesn't really square with my experience both in the stand and on the road, but I don't want to derail this thread. Let's discuss it some other time. Is there a write up of that experiment in
The Dancing Chain? It's a book I should probably add to my shelf anyway.
It was after having to hobble home about 25 miles with most of a broken RD in my jersey pocket that I decided that reliability trumps most other things. Switched to campy after that and didn't go back for a very long time.