Читать книгу Tour Climbs: The complete guide to every mountain stage on the Tour de France - Chris Sidwells - Страница 21

These are what are classically called race bikes. They have dropped handlebars, thin tyres and multiple gears. Entry level models costs about £400 and the amount you pay, as with most things in life, reflects the quality and sophistication of the machine. However, you don’t have to break the bank to buy a good bike. What you are looking for in a road bike suitable for climbing mountains are lightness and gear ratios low enough to allow you to pedal up the climbs in a seated position, and at a reasonably high cadence.

This is the crux of climbing up mountains. You can muscle your way up a short hill by climbing out of the saddle to put more power into the pedals, but you can’t climb the mountains of the Tour de France like that. Not even the pros can. The Tour de France climbs are long, and sometimes they are long and steep. You have to take your time with them. You have to gear down and ride within yourself.

There are two options that give you the low gear ratios you need for climbing Tour de France mountains: triple or compact chainsets. Chainsets are the part of a bike’s drive train that the pedals are attached to. Gear ratios are determined by the size of the chainring on a chainset and the size of the teethed sprockets on the rear wheel. Small chainrings and large sprockets give you low gears, so on a triple chainset there is an extra small chainring, and on compact chainsets both chainrings are smaller than standard.

What goes up must come down

The best system is the compact system because it is the simplest to use, and it’s lighter. You don’t lose high gears either, because most road bikes now have nine or ten sprockets on the rear wheel, more than enough to provide a wide range of gear ratios.

You can buy bikes with triple or compact chainsets, but it’s quite a simple procedure to fit one and adapt almost any road bike to work with them. A good bike shop will advise you on the swap, and happily take on the job if you don’t want to do it.

Touring bikes and cyclo-cross bikes are classified by shops with road bikes. These come equipped with low gears already, so there is no problem there in using either of them to climb mountains. However, cyclo-cross bike have tyres with heavy knobbly treads to give you grip when riding on loose or muddy cross-country surfaces. You should swap these tyres for smooth road tyres if you want to use a cyclo-cross bike in the mountains.