Past masters

Campagnolo and Shimano have produced groupsets for so long that their status is assured. SRAM, as a comparative newcomer, has achieved much in a short period, entering the road market only in 2006 and proving there’s room for more competition. SRAM’s latest groupset, the first-to-market eTap wireless transmission, is one of the most talked about products of 2016.

Other players have attempted to enter their playground. Mavic, the highly respected wheelsmiths of Annecy, released the ‘Tout Mavic’ groupset in 1979, though Sheldon Brown notes that the brake calipers were merely branded Mavic and made by Dia Compe or Modolo.

Mavic’s subsequent electronic transmission – the buzzily-titled ‘Zap’ – was of greater significance, and ridden by Chris Boardman for eight years of his professional career. Its wireless successor, Mektronic, proved less successful, and today neither are in production, with Mavic continuing to focus on wheels.

The greatest delay, however, came from navigating patent issues, rather than the fundamental change to the transmission.

“It’s the biggest part of the story,” he says. “It takes a long time to discover a patent because some are not already approved or even on paper.”

When more advanced prototypes had been developed, FSA faced another challenge: keeping them secret. A spare bike belonging to Michal Kwiatkowski wore the WE prototypes at the 2014 Tour de France, sparking intense media interest. For Bellin, it was a price worth paying.

“We said that working with our partners was more important at that stage than to keep the project secret, because we had already made longer tests with amateurs,” says Bellin. It was time to do a real test with the pros.

Numero Uno?

Rotor Bike Components has a history of using innovation to punch above its weight. Rotor’s oval ‘Q rings’ are a prime example from a company able to forge an identity through innovation, while the sale of more than one million chainsets, compatible across a wide range of groupsets, has allowed Rotor’s engineers to understand the intricacies of shifting.

Rotor offered a first glimpse of the hydraulic Uno groupset at the 2014 edition of Eurobike. Two years later, it is close to fulfilling a first batch of 2,000 orders.

Wolfgang Turainsky heads the technical support division at Rotor, and serves as team liaison to Dimension Data and Cervélo-Bigla. He is under no illusions why competitors have been so reluctant to enter the groupset market.

“Because this is the most complex part of the bicycle,” he says, simply. “There are reasons there are only three companies: investment, development, risk, patent issues.”

That said, he believes that Uno will inspire other companies to take the plunge, who might previously have had doubts about entering the groupset market.

“People really appreciate that there is now more choice,” he says.

Testing, testing

While Rotor supplies two top-tier teams – one men’s and one women’s – it is perhaps significant that the women’s team has adopted the Uno groupset.

While the men’s WorldTour is frequently presented as an arena for cutting-edge technology – portrayed as setting the tone for the consumer market in the way Formula One does for the auto industry – in reality, it is often very conservative. Riders and mechanics prefer to stick with what they know and trust. ‘To finish first, first you must finish,’ is their mantra. However, Rotor’s support of the Cervélo-Bigla team has seen Uno tested at the very highest level.

“Everybody considers the [men’s] WorldTour the gold standard,” Turainsky says. “If you have Mark Cavendish using your product, or Peter Sagan, it is the ultimate. It’s a little bit misleading. It implies that Cervélo-Bigla is not as competitive.

“But this year is Olympic year. It’s a very important year for them; for the girls. So the level of competition is as high as on the WorldTour. The whole cycling community invests a lot of money in this. It’s becoming more of a focus, so it’s not that you can just dump products on them for testing.”

Quality control is another issue that prevents companies from entering the groupset market as readily as they might with frames, for example.

“There’s more engineering involved in the groupsets,” Weatherill says simply. “It’s a lot harder than people think. Anyone can design a frame and have a Chinese company make it.”

While subcontracting is feasible for moulded carbon frames, it opens the door to quality control issues in the component sector.

“Anyone with a bit of money can get a [frame] mould made,” says Weatherill. “It’s a lot easier. But it’s difficult to get components to work and to shift properly. We can do it because our manufacturing is in-house. FSA have very good control and Rotor make things themselves, so they have control.”

Big in Japan…and everywhere else

Ultimately, both FSA and Rotor are hoping – at this early stage – to grab only a small slice of the Shimano, SRAM and Campagnolo pie. However, even the ‘big three’ description is not entirely accurate: Shimano’s resources are of another magnitude to those of either Campagnolo or SRAM. Shimano operates on an almost unimaginable scale but the company’s size is only one reason for its market dominance.

Shimano has forged a reputation over 95 years for quality and reliability. Furthermore, Shimano’s ‘trickle down’ philosophy means that technology introduced at the top tier is soon implemented in cheaper solutions for the masses.

Dura-Ace, the flagship road group produced at the company’s Sakai City headquarters, is the platform from which Shimano launches its new technologies. The 9000 groupset, for example, launched in 2012, introduced a four-arm chainset, a design which has since trickled down to the fourth-tier Sora groupset.

So if Dura-Ace represents the cutting edge – and the recently-launched 9010 iteration represents further refinement – are Shimano’s engineers constantly required to adopt the sort of ‘blank canvas’ approach that Rotor have adopted with Uno in ditching cables and wires for hydraulic shifting?

“We don’t tear up what’s gone before, as there are certain levels of quality and performance that bike riders expect from Dura-Ace,” says Ben Hillsdon, PR officer for Shimano Europe.

“But at the same time, like with Di2 for example, driven in part by the professional cyclists we work with, we identify areas of inefficiency and take inspiration from many areas of life to see what ideas we can adopt or create.”

One might imagine the trickle down philosophy to save time – a ‘copy and paste’ solution for the mechanical realm – but Hillsdon points out that things are not quite so simple. Lower tier groupsets are not inexpensive clones of the flagship; rather they are intended to serve a different audience. The commuter, for example, will expect longer service intervals than the racing cyclist, who accepts that lightweight, highly stressed components must be replaced more regularly.

“The challenge with the lower to mid-tier groupsets is to combine the technology with durability for all-round performance,” Hillsdon explains.

Shimano’s production capacity is mind boggling: some 700,000 chainsets are made each month in its Malaysia facility alone, for example.  Trade events like Eurobike, where each year hundreds of bike brands unveil their new models, most of them dressed in Shimano products, indicates the scale of its customer base.

Both Rotor and FSA told us that initial production runs of Uno and WE will be low – so, with only three major players currently able to satisfy customers as voracious as Canyon, Specialized, Trek et al, surely the choice is narrow?  Shimano says not.

“There are many road bike components and lots of products for the consumer to choose from, which is a good thing,” Hillsdon says. “We can’t speak for our competitors but our reputation is based on providing the best quality at each level.”

This last statement is incontestable. No-one has handed Shimano its dominant market position. It has achieved it through quality, reliability and innovation

“Competition is always good for the product, always good for the consumer, always good for your own everyday challenge,” Rotor’s Turainsky says of Uno’s power to inspire. “But I don’t think that you will suddenly see 20 or 25 different companies coming out with groupsets.”

However, Rotor and FSA are to be applauded, not only for the innovation of their Uno and WE groupsets and coming to market with genuinely unique technology, but in having the commitment to even to attempt to break up such a closed shop.

Both companies are aware of the significant challenge still ahead of them in cracking the dominance of Shimano, SRAM and Campagnolo, but could the ‘big three’ soon become the ‘big five’?