Drop Bar Road – A Closer Look

The concept for our drop bar road bikes started with the vision of creating a road bike with a  vintage vibe but with all the modern components of today’s road bikes. We also noticed that there was a serious lack of road bikes at an affordable price. We wanted to stack as many contemporary features on the drop bar road as possible without sacrificing affordability.

Let’s check out some of the features that make our drop bar road bike in particular awesome!

• STI shifters

We noticed the use of down tube shifters on lower priced road bike models. We really wanted the performance and ease of use of STI Shifters for our drop bar road and were able to make it happen! An STI system integrates shifting into the brake lever itself pulling straight back will engage the brake whereas moving the lever inward will shift gears.

STI shifters allow you to keep your hands on the handlebars while shifting making for a streamlined and convenient shifting experience. If you have ever ridden a bike with an alternative shifting system and then tried STI it might be tough to go back. I’ll make an exception for the rare bar end shifters. I personally really like them on certain road/gravel bikes :).

Here are all the styles of road shifters:

Stem shifters

Downtube Shifters

Bar end Shifters

STI Shifters

• Rack and Fender Mounts

We wanted to make our Drop bar road bike as versatile as possible. From the weekday commuter to the prolific weekend long distance rider we needed to make sure to have options to add racks or fenders (or not) depending on the rider’s use.

We included attachment points for front and rear racks and fenders and even went the extra mile to include “shorty” fork mounts to maximize front rack compatibility.

• Ergo Compact Drop Handlebar

While traditional vintage road bikes have a more rounded drop bar shape our drop bar road has a more modern compact drop that in our opinion is more comfortable over long distances and integrates better with an STI shifting system.