12 speed Groupsets, what’s all about?

12 speed Campagnolo groupsets have been on the market for quite a while and now other manufacturers are launching their own versions. Graeme Freestone King – ex-pro rider who heads up the official Training & Service Centre for Campagnolo UK – gives us his low-down on the ‘need for an extra cog’…

Campagnolo Super Record 12 speed crankset

Why the launch of 12v-speed groups? Please explain the whole idea behind it.

With the increased emphasis on wide ratio cassettes 11-29 and 11-32, the steps between individual sprockets are becoming wider than many riders on the road find optimum. With riders placing more and more emphasis on both the ability to deliver precise levels of power (and as the ability to measure that accurately becomes more and more economic) and with an increasing understanding of the links for individuals between power, cadence and heart rates, keeping the steps between the gears small increases in importance.

This is more important, perhaps, on the road than in MTB. There are many riders who cite examples both recent and historic of situations where being at the right cadence and in the right gear allowed them an advantage over an opponent who was not. Bernard Hinault – a rider who can realistically be credited with being an early adopter of the march towards more and more technological solutions to athletic problems (much of modern bike-fitting owes its origins to the work done by Hinault in association with Claude Genzling and Hianult’s coach at La Vie Claire, Paul Koechli) – gives the example of his win over Gianni Battista at the World Championship as long ago as 1980 – on the Domency climb, Hinault was able to attack and drop Battista because, by Hinault’s reckoning, each time up the climb, he had been riding a different gear to his opponent – Hinault thinks just one tooth difference on the cassette – and in the final, having been riding more efficiently, he forced Battista to try and attack in a less-than-optimal gear.

Bernard Hinault, five times TdF winner and winner of virtually every other significant race on the calendar.

Translated into the current trend for steeper and longer, more testing climbs in the major stage races (and by extension, the modern Gran Fondo, Sportives and “Raids”), the importance of having that close-to optimal gear has increased, so the extra sprocket becomes not so much a way of just increasing range (that could have been done with 11s, after all) but of smoothing the big ring / small ring transition and offering that opportunity to find a closer-to-optimal gear.

For Campagnolo users there is another advantage: many have long used the “Campagnolo double shuffle”, dropping from the big ring to the small and simultaneously upshifting 2 or 3 sprockets at the back (easy with Campagnolo, more difficult for Shimano and SRAM) to stay in basically the same gear but be set up on the small ring for an approaching climb. Wider ratio cassettes make this harder to do as the rear shift needs to be 4 sprockets, ergonomically challenging and sometimes difficult (in terms of chain control) for the derailleurs to handle. 12-speed mostly restores the 3-sprocket “gap”.

Do we really need a 12-speed or can we be happy with 11-speed or even 10-speed groups – is the 12-speed only aimed at new riders who want wide ratios?

“Need” is a very debateable concept in cycling. Decades ago, when I was racing at high level, we only “needed” a 26 sprocket at the biggest, ever – and that was on a 42T inside chainring! Developments in derailleurs and a better understanding of physiology have changed all of that and to me it’s unthinkable that a pro would contemplate climbing Mont Ventoux on a bottom gear of even 39 x 23 as I did a few years ago – simply because (as we now know) not only is it monstrously inefficient but it also disturbs the rhythm of the group. In any bunch-riding situation, whether it’s on a climb or through-and-off on the flat, in a race or a Gran Fondo, it’s easier and the group is more fluid (and thereby safer) if the riders are on similar gears. So as soon as a certain percentage have 12s and so are pedalling certain ranges or availabilities of gears, others will tend to follow.

I don’t know about 12s being aimed only at “newbies”, they’ve been enthusiastically received by the Campagnolo-sponsored teams, partly because of the advantages noted above but also because the innovations in technology generally have continued – many would say that Record 10s was the pinnacle of 10s development from any maker and that only radical revision would give any real improvement in performance – so 11s was conceived. 12s is just the next stepping stone in that development curve with faster shifting at the front and rear, allowing wider ratios with similar steps between and so on.

Why does Campagnolo not do a ‘one-by’ then?

1x for pure road racing events is a non-starter. The steps between individual gears are just too wide and riders find themselves deeply disadvantaged in almost any bunch-riding situation, against the guys with two chainrings for all the reasons outlined above. For Gran Fondo and Sportif, yes, there may be some application and for sure on gravel, but the one experiment in the pro peloton ended badly.

I’d characterise the 1x phenomenon as a part of the increasing (and arguably artificial) segmentation that we are seeing in cycling. The trends that we are seeing emerge are not always driven by what confers a genuine advantage. There’s a lot of smoke-and-mirrors involved to promote some of the new ideas. Sadly I think 1x for road is in that category for most riders. I don’t dispute that for flat road crit / kermesse riding, or flat out-and-back TTs such as those that the UK is so fond of, most riders are effectively riding 1x as the inner ring and front mech are largely (in terms of gear ratios, anyway) an irrelevance. Not many end users, though (or even teams) can afford a hilly road race bike, a crit bike, a hilly TT bike and a flat road TT bike … better to retain the flexibility of 2x and absorb the very small weight penalty and the extremely debatable aero penalty.

Generally speaking and considering not only Campagnolo, how are the other brands tackling this need of an extra cog, dictated by wide range cassette ratios?

Interestingly, SRAMs 12s 2x solution (they have segued away from emphasising the 1x solution used by Aquablue) has taken a different approach to Campagnolo – they *have* used 12s as an opportunity to widen cassette ratios and to look at the relationship between chainring size and cassette size. To do so, though, they have found it necessary to go out on a limb with cassette body design (XD and now XDR) and for reasons of their own, to complicate chainring manufacture and offer only monobloc pairs. SRAM are big players and have an immense financial resource backing them, so it remains to be seen whether those decisions are wise ones – and in the context or professional racing, how what they have done will play with neutral service and wheel-changing in the heat of battle may also be interesting. I think what they have done, in a radical revision of every aspect of the eTAP technology is interesting and commendable – how it will play commercially, once the early adopters (those who just *have* to have the latest thing) have had their day, remains to be seen.

SRAM’s all-new eTap wireless groupset

So far, Shimano have only let us see hints of what they are looking at in 12s. Their front and rear derailleur designs, in the 9100 series, look as if they are future-proofing for wider range cassettes as well as for developments in frame design and possibly for some different 2x ring size combinations.

Whatever Shimano launch, it’ll be interesting and, of course, well-engineered. Because of their market dominance they could take SRAM on at their own game and challenge some current “standards” or they could opt to take a Campagnolo-like approach and retain some existing technologies (especially in the area of wheels and hub design), in an incremental development route.

Anything else that you think is relevant and important to say about the 12-speed groups?

Whatever happens, 12s has to be seen in the light of an ever increasing rate of change in cycle technology. It exists alongside a wider and wider market segregation, part driven by the market itself, part driven by the industry seeking to sell more product (or course). There is also an echo-chamber effect – who knew they needed a gravel bike instead of a CX bike until the marketeers told them? Now, there is a consumer-led demand for gravel bikes and when you look at gravel tech, it’s looking increasingly like XC / MTB tech… and XC / MTB tech in some senses has come full circle – I can recall Bianchi having what a lot of MTB aficionados of the time referred to as a “cheater” MTB with 700c wheels back in the late 1980s / early 1990s – that idea was quashed by MTB racing proclaiming that the only true MTB had a 26″ wheel – and 20-25 years on, what should pop up but the 29-er … a wide 700c size rim.

Maybe if we do go far enough in any given direction, we meet ourselves coming the other way?

12s is certainly here to stay but it should not be viewed as an end in itself – I can see a couple of years of stability in the market but you can bet your bottom dollar that 13- and 14- speed groups are out there in design studios or maybe, even in prototype testing already.

Campagnolo Super Record 12-speed rear mech

Campagnolo Super Record 12-speed Groupset