Vague Idea Racing: Tour de Droopy 3.5

Second part of the "I told you so" gloating victory tour about drooper posts and pro road cycle sporting.

Even just last year, I speculated on Facebook that this HAD to be coming at us in a year or so. The only thing that let me down was that I assumed it would be a SRAM AXS drooper post, because of its easy'ish installation, and it can communicate with handily placed blips... but only two world teams (at that time) were sponsored by SRAM.

So no buneos for most of le peloton.

In recent years tho, there's been a fair amount of cable actuated, lightweight drooper posts. All it would take is some creative finagling to get one to work on a road bike that's not necessarily designed to have one .. in a manner that would actually be useful. That and someone to give it a chance.

“I tested it many times in training. I knew exactly how to use it, and I knew it was very hard for whoever was behind me to keep up, because it lowers your center of gravity a lot. It gives you more handling and more control of the bike. It’s probably not physically possible to go as fast without it.” ~ Mohorič

Duh.

So here we are. Someone acknowledged that mebbe it would be an advantage (that applied to his skillset, I guess), gave it a little testing time, and... the rest is history.

I did have a minor conniption when I read this tho:

"We tested a 12cm dropper but that was too much and meant the pedalling wasn't efficient anymore, so we opted for a 6cm device.. " ~ Mohorič

A billionty years ago (2015), I had a couple things converge at once. I had a lower back injury, Thomson had a new, longer 150mm travel drooper prototype they wanted me to try out, and Niner (formerly now Fox) Mike was able to lend me a ROS 9 that could accommodate the longer drooper AND gimme gears.

Yeth, I used it at work because just getting on and off the bike was a struggle, and the gears were a blessing since all I had were single speeds and my tarck bike. This is back when I spent more than a month sleeping in a hammock I mounted to the walls of our junk room trying to alleviate the pain. It was not a great period in my life.

What was my point?

Oh yeah, my feedback to Thomson at that time was 150mm of travel was "too much," at least for this four apple tall man child. That's what I said then... when I was still less than two years into living the droop life... when I thought 125mm was enough.

But then as time went on, and I got very used to drooped pedaling to add speed while descending, I wanted the saddle even more out of the way when riding the chunk gnar, and more options became available for my non-internally rooted Vertigo Meatplow V.6.

Down the rabbit hole...

30.9 150mm external Fox Transfer on the Meatplow V.6... a 185mm PNW drooper on the Meatplow V.8 (and also V.9)... and then Fox discontinued the external Transfer followed by a slippery slope decision to buy a 175mm travel AXS bleep bloop post for the V.6.

I have to charge my bike now. Dammit.

Point being, I don't know when you get to the point of diminishing returns, but it doesn't usually start with the first try. Keep in mind, it you wanna argue about pedaling efficiency while drooped, remember that they were all pedaling while doing the "super tuck" and WINNING back when it was still legal.