Retroshift™ is a new and somewhat unexpected approach to a combined braking and shifting system. Designed to meet the particular requirements of Cyclo-cross the result is so simple but so effective you might well question why we were using such complex systems in the first place
BikeRumor.com
Founded by Adam Clement as an alternative to running (sometimes very) expensive mechanical levers on dirty, muddy, crash-prone cyclocross bikes, Retroshift takes an age old shifting idea and gives it a fresh spin.
Retroshift levers combine a metal brake lever with a simple indexed “thumb lever” style shifter arm, much like the ones found on down tubes from bikes a couple decades ago. Ergonomically, hitting the full range of gears with a single hand movement has now been race proven under Kona’s Erik Tonkin.
“What I most like about them is how quickly I can shift up into harder gears – I can easily go thru 4-5 gears at a time,” said Tonkin, after racing the levers to a win at the muddy Kruger Farm race in Oregon a couple weekends ago. ” I can also plow through a lot of gears on the downshift. This is a feature only offered by down-tube and bar-end shifters–modern STI levers don’t really afford two-way, multiple-gear shifting with one throw of a lever.”
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