Drop bars off-road? No thanks, say Benji
Why are people riding drop handlebars off-road? To answer that, let’s first ask ‘why are people riding drop handlebars on-road?’ To my feeble brain, there are two reasons. First, aerodynamics. Drop bars make you lower and thus less of a wind brake. Second, fashion.
Aerodynamic reasons are fine. On the road. That’s pretty much all that road cycling is about after all. Fighting air. Once you’re going faster than an ebike (15mph) the main opponent to your onward progress is wind resistance. Been there, done that. Not for me, fine for you. Knock yourself out.
The average moving speed for Robin Gemperle, the winner of the 2025 Tour Divide, was 12.9mph. Last year’s winner of the almost-half-of-it-is-on-tarmac Three Peaks Cyclocross race (Giles Drake) had an average speed of 12.67mph. And the average speed of Rob Britton, the winner of the 350 mile Unbound Gravel XL race was… ah, dammit. It was 20.13mph.
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But hang on! What doesn’t the Unbound Gravel XL race contain? Singletrack, that’s what. The raison d’être of off-road cycling.
What is my point here? I don’t really know. Something about aero being broadly irrelevant once you leave tarmac, maybe? This whole pile of guff came about after a period earlier this year that I spent test riding a couple of gravel bikes. To cut a long story short, I failed to find a situation (that wasn’t tarmac) where drop handlebars were anything other than… completely awful.
A bit of mid-gravel ride maths told me: the bike I was riding had a 70mm stem and the forward projection of the drop bars was 90mm, so that was the equivalent of riding a 150mm stem. Off-road. JFC. Not only that, the handlebars were approximately a foot narrower than my usual handlebar width. 20in wide bars on a 6in long stem? What is this, 1993?
This quandary was exacerbated by my idle questioning as to whether Hannah had ridden in the drops during her Pennine Bridleway Bikepacking adventure featured a couple of issues ago. Anyway, Hannah basically said that no, she didn’t use the drop section of the bars at all.
I immediately couldn’t help but think (and blurt out loud) that she would have had a much more pleasant experience if the bike had sported a flat handlebar. Which is entirely true. But it strikes me that drop baristas don’t really want to have pleasant experiences. They prefer to suffer, struggle, wrestle with their bike. Weird. Cycling is supposed to be fun, not a fight.
One of the more egregious claims of gravel riders is that drop bars give you multiple hand positions to ease the discomfort. To which I say, this just sounds like drop bars don’t have a single satisfactory hand position!
Drop bars need multiple positions because every single one of them is flawed. I’ve done numerous very long rides on flat handlebar bikes and never ever really felt the need for a wholesale different hand position. The multiple hand position is simply evidence of a component with improper design, not a reason why said component has worth.
And how about braking? On drop bars you have a real Hobson’s Choice; you can get decent braking power and feel but only if you ride in the terrifying drops, or you have vaguely less terrifying hand positions on the hoods but you can’t really brake very well. By the way, it’s all the braking on the hoods that is killing your hands and forearms, necessitating the aforementioned need to move your hand position.
Essentially, my ill-fated time on gravel bikes kinda made me think of The Emperor’s New Clothes. Why is no one pointing out the drop bars off-road are illogical? They are a fashion item. They’re tribal branding. Worse than that, drop bars smack of sneery gate-keeping; drop bars signify that you are A Serious Cyclist. Ugh.
Speaking of gate-keeping wankery… bar tape. WTF? A fundamentally awful thing dressed up as Something Serious Cycling and/or rites-of-passagey. Mark my words, the roadmap that ends at thru-headset cable routing began with the Velominati’s blessing of bar tape as a grip medium.
Anyone who wears the truth-revealing sunglasses from the movie ‘They Live’ can see that, for the terrain that gravel bikes are being ridden on, a flat bar is by far the best component for the job. Why are flat-handlebar, 700C-wheeled bicycles so mocked and hated by Serious Cyclists? Such bikes are amazing. Genuine multi-purpose velocipedes of aceness. Wanna go bikepacking? There is no way on Bod’s green Earth that the best bike for doing that has drop bars on it. No freaking way.
Believe it or not, I’m not actually that bothered about drop bars off-road. Deep down (or not so deep down), I think we all know that gravel bikes are just retro mountain bikes with drop bars. That’s fine.
Just don’t try to introduce some kind of legitimacy or functionality argument when it comes to gravel riding. Gravel riding is stupid. That’s the whole point of it. It’s taking a knife to a gun fight. It’s going to Tesco in a tank. It’s the wrong tool for the job. Can we stop with the World Champs rainbows and hi-mod carbon this and gravel specific chamois that?
The allure of the drop bar is strong.
I’d possibly go as far as saying that the creation of the drop handlebar was one of the finest bits of aesthetic engineering of the past 150 years. Drop bars look fantastic. That is why they are the handlebar of people who want to be seen as being ‘a cyclist’. Drop bars ARE cycling.
Despite what cyclists may deludedly tell themselves, it’s not drop bars’ undeniable aero advantage in professional road racing that has kept them desirable. It’s the look of drop bars that we love.
We love the look of them so much that we’re prepared to pilot terrifyingly unstable, short wheelbase, low traction, twitchy, neck-aching, back-breaking, hand-throbbing machines in exchange for having that aesthetic at the front of our bikes, leading the way.
Seriously, the whole design of a drop bar bicycle is massively compromised purely so we can run the beautiful component that is a drop handlebar. Seat angles are awful. Reach figures are woeful. Bar tape is a thing FFS. Shimano had to invent STI ‘brifters’! We don’t even want brake levers for when we’re riding on the tops because of aesthetic reasons. Nothing must get in the way of The Look.
Ironically, it’s gravel bike culture that has confirmed this theory of ‘survival of the prettiest’. Flared drop bars? Functionally, they may well be better off-road than trad drops. But if you want function, ditch the drop altogether and go flat! Flared drop bars look disgusting. They totally ruin the aesthetic of drop bars. As soon as you flare the bars, you’ve lost it. ‘It’ being the whole point of drop bars: they look the way they look. Which is perfect. They may completely impair effective bike handling, but they do look perfect.
And that’s something worth holding on to.
As a contrarian I like the looks of flared drops! With a confirmed L4/L5 disc condition the bikes with drops that fit me don’t aggravate this. Very much a bike fit is everything on fashionable drop-barred bikes for those of us in our seventh decade!