TransAm gear: SRAM eTap

When I was deciding on parts for shifting duties for the TransAm bike, it was basically down to two choices – because I wanted to be able to shift from both the brake hoods and from the aerobars, electronic shifting made the most sense, so with FSA’s WE group not ready yet, that gave me the choice of Shimano Di2 or SRAM eTap. Having been riding eTap on two bikes for a year, I was already familiar with it, and the no-thinking single button system made a lot of sense knowing I would be riding tired.

SRAM very kindly set me up with a groupset: Red cranks with 34/50 chainrings, eTap shifters (plus Clics for the aerobars) and derailleurs, 11-28 cassette, chain and their lightweight two-piece disc rotors (unfortunately the hydraulic brake version wasn’t ready yet, so I used TRP mechanical calipers). The eTap battery charger is very small and light, so that was easy to carry, and the handy thing about the SRAM system over the competition is the failsafe of there being two batteries on the bike – in the event of running out of charge they can be swapped to enable shifting where needed. I was tempted to run the batteries to flat, just to see how far across I could get…… but that wasn’t really sensible, so the plan was just to charge every four or five days.

In use the group was as flawless as ever. No missed shifts, no chain drops, just consistent, low effort shifting. The tactile feedback from the main shifter buttons is perfect – enough of a ‘click’ to know that a shift has been made, with very minimal resistance. All 22 gears are available without any chainrub at the extremes, thanks to the clever ‘yaw’ front derailleur. The Clic buttons on the aerobars are very familiar to me after the similar version I made for my TT bike. It worked very well to be able to easily shift from the aero position – I would just say that a bit of a tactile feedback on these buttons would be nice; occasionally I would hit the button and not get a shift as I hadn’t pushed it quite far enough.

The brake hoods have a very good shape – the lack of mechanical parts inside means they are a bit slimmer and I find them very comfortable.

Overall, the group performed great – just another part of the system that I didn’t have to think about, which is the best compliment I can give.

Many thanks to SRAM for their support:  www.sram.com