A 120mm track-ended (or horizontal dropoutted) frameset with a derailleur hangar is just a modern update of the traditional 40s-50s British path racer, a road bike easily converted for track use.
BITD, for a long time after WWII, massed race cycling on public roads was forbidden in the UK. If caught, race participants could be severely punished. Aside from making club racers/not-racers sneaky around Tommy Law, it meant that the dominant forms of competitive cycling became time trialing (riding alone on a measured course; fastest posted time wins, and if the police stop you, you can claim you were just out for a recreational ride of a Sunday) and track racing. Since tracks were expensive to build and mostly were only in cities, "path racing" on grass courses (some local meadow) became a thing. Like soccer, competitive cycling has historically been a sport of the poor. Poor people got good at cycling because they rode bikes all the time. They were the cheapest form of personal transportation one could get, so you rode everywhere. A club cyclist typically only owned one bicycle, which had to do everything. So the club racers would often have one bike, with two sets of wheels: A geared wheelset (often with steel rims) for just riding around, and a lighter track wheelset with tubular tires for competition. Since the bike was their transportation and they had no other way to get their bike to races, they'd hang the track wheelset from clips mounted to either side of the front axle, ride to wherever that weekend's race was held and swap the wheelset around. They'd ride laps around the meadow, remove the trackie wheelset, replace the geared wheelset (with either an IGH or a hanging derailleur) and head back home - with or without a stop at the pub for a pint for the road. If someone uses a flip-flop wheel, with mounting for a track cog on one side and a freewheel on the other, why shouldn't the freewheel be a multigear freewheel, if the wheel's dished to allow it? Then you'd need a frame-mounted hanger (or a derailleur-mounted add-on hanger) to mount the "multi-cog negotiation mechanism". Peter Adler Berkeley, CA/USA On Friday, July 14, 2023 at 4:01:03 PM UTC-7 Jason Fuller wrote: I keep forgetting about the dangling hanger. Such a silly thing to have added IMO, particularly if 120 spaced. Admittedly I don't understand the attraction to the 3-by-1 drivetrain, but regardless, a regular vertical-dropout bike is well suited to that already. It's not a huge visual impact, but it shouldn't be there in my opinion. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rbw-owners-bunch/0fccb9e1-76c8-4869-b35a-f8043dc05c90n%40googlegroups.com.
