The arrival of a small package has prompted me to write a post in lieu of an email to Ride magazine on a topic that’s been festering in me for some time. The small package contains a sample of the Devil’s work in the form of an Ultegra 12-23 cassette and matching chain. The rankling subject is summed up in the question “why have groupset manufacturers served the serious recreational cyclist so poorly since the introduction of indexed gearing?”

When I was a lad my first bike that wasn’t a hand-me-down dragster had a 50-40 chainring pair and a prodigious 14-35 five-speed freewheel. Looking back it’s a wonder I ever got up enough speed to shift from one sprocket to the next, but that 40×35 combination did allow Crash and I to “invent” a precarious thin-rim version of mountain-biking in the Perth hills a few years before things went mad in Marin County. If only I’d lived in Belgium and my trusty Porshe had been 10 kg lighter I could have taken up cyclo-cross.

At that time if you had a more serious road bike the rings would have been 52-42 for hilly days and 52-49 for the flats with a 13-17 straight block at the back regardless. That was fine if you wanted to look hard and hear your ligaments popping as you ground your way up a hill, but more sensible folk took refuge in the fact that the simplicity of the transmission allowed them to use any combination of chainrings and sprockets they fancied, subject only to the ability of the rear derailleur to wrap the spare chain, and how much clanking they could put up with when the time came to change gears.

Then along came indexed shifting. Some cranks may still rant against it in general but it was a necessary stepping stone on the way to integrated shifting, which is indeed a thing of rare beauty. But somewhere along the way the serious recreational cyclist got forgotten, and often seems to remain so. Compact cranksets were an obvious offering yet we waited more than a decade for them to come about. Meanwhile the selection of chainring and sprocket combinations produced to work with the finicky indexing ran a blur from elite racing offerings to docile touring offerings without really touching on the needs of the serious non-racer out to ride fast in the sunshine and be home by tea-time. I no longer need a 30-tooth sprocket to get up a nasty hill, but it seems if I want something sensible at the soft end I’m obliged to either have bigger gaps than I’d like or an eleven-tooth sprocket stencilled “For Cav” at the hard end.

Skip forward to the present day. Compact cranksets have been a marketing success and everybody should be happy. Set up a compact system with the same top gear as its big brother and you generally gain a gear at the bottom end, or constrain the range and you get closer gears.

So what’s my beef? When compacts first came out there were a range of chainring combinations with 50-36, 50-34 and 48-34 all possible depending on your preferred brand. Now the “consensus” seems to have whittled away to 50-34 as the standard. When I made the leap with the refurbished Giant I wanted to get a 50-36 figuring 14 teeth was a big enough gap but was forced into a 50-34 by what was available, even though SRAM listed my preferred choice on their website. At least at the time I was able to get a 12-26 cassette, which I think they discontinued for a while in favour of the absurd 12-25*, though I see both are currently listed as available.

Which brings me back to the package. Despite escaping four weeks of this winter the Giant has had a good trashing on Perth’s bike paths in the last few months on my daily commute, and the inevitable sand-grinding that results has put me in need of a new chain. I haven’t checked the cassette for wear yet but I thought I’d save postage and future hassle by ordering one at the same time. So while the good news was I could replace my 12-26 with the same specification I could not get the 12-23 I really wanted. While I’d been happy to have a 21-tooth sprocket as my effective bottom gear on the medium ring, I’d come around to missing the 18-tooth sprocket for cruising more than I’d enjoyed not often feeling the need to shift to the small ring on my commute.

Now as I write this post I am truly shocked to report that neither the SRAM Red nor the Force/Rival cassettes has an 18-tooth cog in any of their combinations! A palpable slap in the face of the SRC! Why do I love the 18 so much? Look at it this way. At 105 rpm on a 50×19 combination I’m humming along at almost 36 km/hr. I’m feeling good but to make the jump to the 17 and maintain the same cadence I need to do almost 40 km/hr. All well and good for elite athletes nestled in a peloton, but pity poor me cruising down the freeway bike path with Freddy on my wheel. Slip in the sweet 18 and the ask is only 38 km/hr. Those two km/hr are the difference between legs say yes and legs say no.

All of which is a long way of explaining the contents of the package. Mr Shimano, in his inscrutable and devilish wisdom, allows me to buy a 12-23, perhaps to assuage his guilt for creating the problem with indexed gearing. Over at Campagnolo where things go to eleven they give with one hand and take away with the other: a 12-25 includes a sweet 18, but why not plonk a 26 on there?

*While on the one foot I would argue that having a 34-tooth chainring makes the size of the biggest sprocket almost irrelevant, and after all one tooth is only one tooth, on the other foot I’ve always thought that you may as well go for that bit more on your last sprocket given that you’ll only ever use it with the small ring. I’d also suggest that the drop from 23 to 26 with a 34 at the front still feels about right, while a 25 will just be a bit close to being more of the same.