50 YEARS OF SHIMANO DURA-ACE

As Shimano's flagship groupset celebrates half a century, Simon Smythe looks back at the history of the racer's go-to gearing option in modern times

- Simon Smythe

It's 50 years since Dura-Ace's debut but 2023 will not be a year on which Shimano looks back with undiluted pleasure, to paraphrase the Queen's 1992 annus horribilis speech.

Instead of unveiling a gold-festooned, limited-edition commemorative Dura-Ace groupset to the great and good of cycling, the Japanese component giant has made the humiliating admission that almost three million cranksets made between 2012 and 2019 could be affected by a manufacturing flaw that has caused over 4,000 breakages.

However, in the grand scheme - and the Grand Tours of the last 50 years there have been many more hits than misses. Although Shimano has wisely limited its celebrations to paintings on the roads of each Grand Tour plus a discreet '50th Anniversary' logo on its website while it prioritises the inspection and replacement programme, the fact remains that Dura-Ace has brought in technology which has not only transformed pro racing but also changed how all of us ride our bikes.

And as for its erstwhile durability, many of those earlier groupsets are still adorning classic bikes and working flawlessly thousands of miles later.

In the beginning

1973 is regarded as year zero for Dura-Ace, but rather than the sort of matching groupset with a coordinated aesthetic that we're used to, the first iteration included Shimano's Crane rear derailleur, which wasn't even Dura-Ace branded.

Crane wasn't a me-too derailleur. It used a dropped parallelogram design with two sprung pivots that was arguably superior to Campagnolo's Nuovo Record derailleur with its single-sprung pivot-geometry which had been around for years.