The first day of the Gran Prix of Gloucester is finally over with Caroline Mani and Jeremy Powers taking wins despite very tough competition from the young Americans Ellen Noble and Curtis White, who both finished second in the respective Elite Women’s and Men’s races.
Stay tuned for race report and the full results as they come in, but first, we wanted to share a little DIY from a young engineering student from RIT. We met Andrew Lints last year in his first season of racing cyclocross. During the summer, we spotted him working for the GURU fitting center during the Cannondale p/b Cyclocrossworld.com Camp. There he told us he was making something a little special with a dropper post and would let us be one of the first to see it.
Just before he set off on the Men’s Cat 3 race in Gloucester, he came to us with the finished product: a SRAM RED left shifter that instead of being gutted for his single chainring drivetrain, was converted into lever to adjust his dropper post.
We asked if he was planning on using it during the race, and he said that there were plenty of rough sections this year that he could make good use of having a dropper post for. The tactic appeared to work. Less than ten minutes later, Lints was riding off the front of the Cat 3 field, on his way to the win. Considering the deep fields that Gloucester tends to attract for even the mid-category riders, we can expect to see this technology working its way up to the UCI fields soon once Lints finishes his mountain bike season.
We were not able to get the full details of the conversion, although Lints said that he wished he could have used an internal routing for the cable instead of doubling up on the external rear brake routing of his Cannondale. More details to follow.
