Too little, too late

Have you ever heard about these things called gravel bikes? Apparently, these are a special kind of bicycles that you need if you ever want to leave a safety of pavement and feel adventurous enough to explore those untamed dirt roads. Well, at least that's roughly how these bikes are marketed to road cyclists.

Nevertheless, it's a trend and gained huge popularity. More and more people don't want to ride on roads anymore for a variety of reasons - whether it's the necessity of "sharing" the space with speeding cars, boredom of counting potholes in asphalt, or a feeling of requirement to look like Lance Armstrong in Tour de France.

It's 2019 and now pretty much every bicycle manufacturer offers a "gravel bike" in their catalog. There's a problem though and it's the gearing. You see, bicycle components that are supposed to work well with drop handlebars were originally developed for racing road bikes. As such, shifters and derailleurs were built to handle modest gearing ranges and more importantly, high gearing with very limited low gearing options. 

Gearing of a typical racing road bike with 25mm wide tires, 50/34T crankset and a 11-30T cassette offers range from 30 to 122 gear inches. I won't go into details what gear inches are, but basically, it's enough to know that more means a "harder" gear - faster, but requiring more power to spin the cranks. Few ordinary mortals (non-racers) would ever be able to spin cranks fast enough to use those 122 gear inches effectively. In fact, I bet that many smallest cogs in road bike cassettes remain unused, as very few average Joes need such a high gearing. They would likely be much, much happier with 22-100 gear inches of range.

Unfortunately, this is basically what we had to go with if we wanted to ride a bike with drop bars - simply because there were very few options for road-compatible cranksets that could handle smaller chainrings.

 

Trek Checkpoint - a gravel bike with road racing components. In my opinion way too over-geared for an average Joe.

 
On top of that, gravel bike wheels are typically larger than road bike wheels, since they run wider tires, which means that the same road component groupset installed on a gravel bike results in too high gears. Yet another example how out-of-place those road components were on gravel bikes.

As such, gravel cyclists started to move to 1x setups with a single front chainring and wide-range cassettes to combat this issue. There were few truly low 2x road gearing options available.

Not anymore.

Today, Shimano - the largest bicycle component manufacturer, finally joined the XXI century by introducing GRX - their "gravel" groupset. However important this is for us - average mortals, unfortunately, I feel that this move is still too conservative and offers too little, too late.

First of all, there's no 12-speed option, in time when everyone is moving to 12 speeds for MTB and road. That's probably ok for now - not everybody needs 12 speeds.

Then, there are the cranksets: 48/31T and 46/30T. That's all good. These are much more useful gearing ranges than the road compact 50/34T, which required superhuman abilities to ride uphill. Still, why not give us more choices? Where is the 42/26T for example?

Finally, Shimano didn't show any new cassettes, which means they expect us to pair the new components with their existing 11-32T and 11-34T cassettes. Why not introduce something like a 10-44T or 10-46T cassette, based on the existing Microspline standard?

Other minor issue I have with the new groupset is what I complained about a lot in the past - it only comes in black. I guess classic polished silver is a thing of the past and is not coming back.

In general, I think that the new GRX is a welcomed addition to Shimano component line for three main reasons:

1. It's coming from the large manufacturer who finally decided to recognize a global trend.
2. It will help to end dominance of the silly race-oriented gearing in amateur, recreational road bikes. An average Joe won't be struggling riding uphill anymore.
3. It will appeal to all those "gravel" folks who like to race. For them, the new gearing range offered by GRX is likely close to perfect.

For me, this would be great maybe... 5 years ago. Since then, I have moved towards even lower gearing, rougher roads and trails. Now I want Shimano to simply make their road and MTB groupsets compatible so I can mix and match components as much as I like. I want to use MTB rear derailleur with STI shifters and road cranks. Seems that I may have to wait another 5 years for it.