Originally Posted by
mattm
As for old bikes/equipment - local dude won a cat 2/3 crit here this season on downtube shifters (field sprint no less).
Granted it was just in CA and not in the rust belt, but still! Pretty impressive. And goes to show that equipment doesn't matter as much as the legs - or brain for that matter.
I have to say, the worst part of racing a 20 year-old bike, BY FAR, was the brakes. Good lord, the brakes. They were terrible. And these were Shimano SLRs, among the best single-pivot calipers ever made. Everything else, assuming you're comparing good-quality bikes, is marginal. Road bikes just haven't changed all that dramatically in the last 30 years.