The Future Does Not Have Fewer Gears

Way back in 2019, Andrew Major wrote a piece for a different publication titled “Does the Future Have Fewer Gears?” advocating for fewer speeds, with more range in mountain bike drivetrains. Last week SRAM dropped their new road and gravel groupsets which have 13 speed cassettes, effectively proving that no, the future is now, and it’s got a lot of gears.

But, for a period of about three years, from when I first read Andrew’s article to last summer, when I took this job that involves riding and writing about the latest gear, I spent the majority of my time riding fewer gears than the current standard of 12. And while I review bikes with Transmission and XTR, I’ve always kept at least one bike in the garage running a weird bastardized 10-speed setup.

Right now that bike is the new Trek Top Fuel, and since a full review of that bike, in a few different permutations, is coming soon, it felt appropriate to spill some ink about its drivetrain, and my hankering for more drivetrain options.

But I thought you liked Transmission?

Yeah. I friggin love Transmission. I’m happy to be caught guilty eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and eagle, juice dripping down the fig leaves on my chest. If you told me that I needed to run the same drivetrain on every single mountain bike for the next five years, I’d be perfectly content if that drivetrain was GX Transmission. But that’s not how the rules work, and instead, I get to ride different bikes with different purposes that excel with different drivetrains.

For me, those other bikes fall into two classes: light, efficient bikes that I want to go fast uphill on, and really big, stupid, heavy DH or freeride bikes that I want to go fast downhill on. Those two disparate use cases land me at the same drivetrain preference.

I love light, snappy little bikes. I owned a Transition Spur for a couple of years, and then I swapped it for an XC build of a Kona Honzo ST, and now the same build is on the Trek Top Fuel. On all three of those bikes, I enjoyed running a lower-range drivetrain with fewer speeds because it made me feel like one of those pro-e-bike commenters who are always going on about how they go further in the same amount of time, and burn just as many calories as they would on a meat bike. I can do the same thing, for a lot less money, on an XC bike with a 11-36 cassette.

Something is broken in my psyche so that on singletrack climbs I always default to my easiest gear. If I make my easiest gear not that easy (currently a 32/36 tooth) I just push harder, go faster, and feel stronger. It’s counterintuitive, but it works. I love zipping around Galbraith on an undergeared bike, muscling it up climbs and breaking all my old speed records. It’s delightful. It goes so fast! It’s powered by sour candy, not lithium batteries!

And then on the other end of the spectrum, I can’t quite justify a full DH bike, because I don’t go to the bike park that often, and lots of the places I want to ride a long travel bike require a fair bit of pedaling to get there. So I’m in the midst of building a DH bike with a dropper post, and I want a drivetrain with a little bit of range, but not the “catch on crap and be a pain in the butt” potential of a 12 speed setup. This, again, is a great place for a bike with fewer than 12 speeds.

Both of those scenarios are specific to me, but can be applied to folks anywhere in the mountain biking world. Live somewhere flat? You probably don’t need a 52T. Spend all your time shuttling or bike park riding? The same goes for you.

What I’m running, and why I’m running it

On the Top Fuel, I’m currently running a 10 speed Shimano XT derailleur, paired to a Zee shifter, SRAM PG-1030 11-36 cassette, and a 10 speed SRAM chain. Why? Because I bought the derailleur for a failed experiment with Microshift, the shifter has been banging around in my parts drawer for ages, and the cassette was cheap at my local shop. I fully admit, this is not a terribly thoughtful setup.

But it works well, bangs out shifts relatively reliably, and does what I want it to do. I do notice more chain slap than I have on more modern drivetrains, and it doesn’t really shift under power, but on the flip side, I rarely have to fiddle with it, and the shifting stays better longer than on more modern drivetrains (excluding Transmission.)

The Microshift elephant in the room

There is a vocal contingent of folks on the internet who claim that Microsoft's Advent X is all the drivetrain anyone could ever need. And I really wish I could agree with them. It’s light, it’s affordable, it’s got lots of range, what isn’t there to love? I tried for two years to make Microshift work for me but it never quite did.

The clutch wasn’t strong enough (I’ve never dropped so many chains) the shifting was unreliable, and it had a tendency to ghost shift when riding through chunder. Microshift claims their new derailleur addresses some of those issues, but I haven’t had a chance to try it. After one too many times when a ghost shift in a braking-bumped berm made me miss my pedal stroke into a jump, I pulled my Microshift drivetrain off the bike for good.

If it works for you, awesome! For me, it’s just a touch below my bar for a minimum viable drivetrain product for mountain biking.

No, I don’t want to singlespeed and wear denim

Because this is a line of experimentation triggered by the honorable master Major, this disclaimer feels necessary: I know that lots of you like riding bikes with just one gear. I tried it. I didn’t like it. I like hitting jumps and I’m not good enough at pumping to hit all the jumps I like on a singlespeed. Also, I don’t like denim or whiskey or coffee that much, and my music taste isn’t alternative enough. Sorry. Gears are fun.

So what are you looking for?

This is where this article really goes off the rails. I quite like the bastardized drivetrain I’m running, but I think it could be better. In a perfect world I’d have a stronger clutch, more precise shifting, and it would all be based around an XD driver body because I hate having to stack gears in the right order, I hate having to make sure they’re not biting an HG driver body, and it would make interchangeability of wheels between bikes simpler. Give me a 10-40T 8 speed cassette on an XD driver body that’s not absurdly heavy, and send me on my way!

Barring that, there’s another alternative. But it’s really expensive, and I’m not quite positive enough that it will work for me to just buy it. SRAM makes a very cool XO DH cassette that’s absurdly light and machined out of one piece of aluminum. It’s one of the sexiest looking things they manufacture. So unsurprisingly, it’s expensive as hell. At MSRP it costs $304, $54 more than a GX Transmission cassette. Pair that with a GX DH derailleur and an XO shifter, and party on.

I’m pretty confident that I could push that 24 tooth easy gear with a 30 tooth chainring up most of the climbs I want to ascend on an XC bike. If not, a 28 tooth ring would be just fine.

For now

I don’t have an industry crystal ball or any advanced knowledge. But I’ll be completely unsurprised if SRAM or Shimano drops a viable 13 speed MTB drivetrain in the next 18 months. If they do, I hope it’s good. Regardless, I know it’s a lot less likely that someone drops a good 10 speed drivetrain that’s not e-bike optimized in the same time span, but I can’t help thinking that it would be a much more logistically easy endeavor. The future might not have fewer gears, but I’m still stoked to shave a few when I can.