I’ve had the chance to ride all three major groupset on the market for a reasonable amount of time now and I love and hate things about each of them. Since we spend many intimate hours with our groupset we have a very close relationship with it. I’m hoping that we can settle the groupset debate once and for all here.
I can say that I like Campy’s crisp, solid, chunky feel. Campy has created a passionate fanbase equivalent to Apple geeks. I’ve even seen people with Campagnolo tattoos. They say that Campy wears-in while other groupsets wear-out.
Shimano has excellent reliability, great engineering and innovation and has electrified the groupset. They hold nearly 90% of the entire world’s cycling component market and 97%+ the worlds OEM market (not sure how current that it). They turn over US$1billion in bike components. How could they not be good with numbers like that? They also make a kick-ass fishing reel.
SRAM is the new kid on the block and is making unbelievable ground. It has great ergonomics and a shifting mechanism that works great. They also bought Zipp last year. They’re aggressively and successfully taking away market share from Campy and Shimano and have even switched over a guy named Lance. And Lance has been known to be fairly pedantic about his equipment.
So fellow riders, how do you define groupset perfection?