In a fit of market-be-damned design that would come to be his trademark, Grant Petersen left a lot of people scratching their heads when he put drop bars on Bridgestone’s top-of-the-line MB1 mountain bike back in 1987.
The bike didn’t sell terribly well, and the drop bars came off in subsequent model years. Iconoclast and retrogrouch though he was, even Grant Petersen had to bow to market trends from time to time when he worked for a big bike company. Today, as founder and owner of Rivendell Bicycle Works Grant continues to follow his own muse, perhaps especially when it runs counter to industry trends.
I’ve never ridden the 1987 MB1, but I have done an awful lot of riding off road on different bikes equipped with drop bars. From 2003-2008 I pretty much rode cyclocross style drop-bar bikes exclusively, on and off road. It was a lot of fun to pass a group of people on mountain bikes and hear one of them say, “did you see that dude on a 10-speed?” This was my set-up at the time:
These days, I have the luxury of owning more than one bike, and most of my off roading takes place on a full-on dual suspension mountain bike. In my view, they can’t be beat for comfort, speed, safety and just all-around fun on rougher trails. However, for the right trail, it can still be a lot of fun to do some off roading on a rigid drop-bar bike, especially if you have a route that involves some mixed terrain.
One of the loops that I like to do is found about 45 minutes east of San Diego in Cuyamaca Ranchero State Park. Here are a couple of pics of a loop I did in early June aboard my drop-bar adventure bike. If Grant Petersen did a re-issue of the 1987 MB1 and made it in titanium, perhaps it would look something like this:
I saw a bobcat just minutes after taking this photo on the climb up Milk Ranch Road. Alas, I wasn’t quick enough with the camera!
When the terrain gets this rocky down a steep descent, riding my rigid drop-bar bike isn’t so fun. More on optimal off-road set-up below.
While the ride in the Cuyamacas was fun, there is no denying that it beats you up compared to riding the same route with flat bars and suspension. There are sections that are so rocky that it just about takes the fun out of it. That said, my bike isn’t really optimized for riding rough single track, but is really more of an all-rounder made to ride a variety of surfaces.
If you ride off road with a bike set up like mine, with the tops an inch or two below the saddle, you will be happy on smooth flats and climbs. But when it comes time to descend rough road or trail, you’ll need your hands down in the hooks where you can properly brake. The result is a fair bit of weight on the front wheel and a sound beating to your hands. Not the optimal set-up for riding rigid, where geometries that unweight the hands, à la Jeff Jones are the hot ticket:
Notice how his design puts your weight back with the slack seat tube angle, and then unweights your hands with a relatively short toptube and high bars? When you are down in the hooks on my bike, you get almost the opposite effect.
To make the drop-bar thing really work off road, you need a bike set-up that is optimized for it. This means getting the tops of the bars way above the saddle so that the hooks of the drops are more or less where your normal flat bars would be. Properly set-up, a dedicated drop bar off-road bike really only has this one good position. But it is a good one! More on proper setup from off-road drop-bar expert and frame builder, Matt Chester.
