sjanzeir

I remember that within the (tiny) road racing community in my home town in 1990s Jordan, drop bars were the minimum "price of admission" for me to be taken seriously as a fellow road cyclist/aspiring racer, and I had to have either a Peugeot or a Raleigh to "fit in." So I just had to buy an entry-level Nottingham-made Raleigh with drop bars. In reality, though, I never found them particularly useful or comfortable. For me, they were more of a nuisance than a feature.

When I got peer-pressured (the "peer" being my MTBing brother-in-law) to get myself onto a road bike 20 years later, I found that I disliked them in 2016 just as much as I disliked them in 1996, but this time around I disliked them even more on account of the new-to-me brifters that I just could never seem to get used to (albeit I rode that 2016 Trek 1.2 only twice in 10 days before I returned it to the dealer and got an FX instead.)

As far as my own riding is concerned, the flat bars on my 7.6FX, with its two-finger brake levers and trigger shifters, are "just good enough." I'm more than happy with the one hand position. Perhaps it comes with aging, or perhaps it's because of hybrids (particularly road-like hybrids/flat-bar road bikes) becoming far more common today than they used to be even a decade ago, but I no longer feel awkward or embarrassed to hang with the more "serious" roadies with my "amateur" FX.