Racing Inventors

Chris Sidwells looks back at the pioneering racers who used brains as well as brawn to come up with new ideas to improve the performance of their bikes — innovative, groundbreaking designs that are still around today.

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1 Tullio Campagnolo: quick-release (1930) Tullio Campagnolo was the most effective racer-inventor in cycling history, not just for the manufacturing company he founded but for the longevity of his first invention. As an enduring cycling design, the quick-release mechanism is only surpassed by the double-diamond frame and the spoked wheel.

Campagnolo grew up in his father’s Vicenza hardware store taking things to bits and incorporating them in something else. He was a good cyclist, a professional racer, who chanced upon his true vocation on a freezing cold day in 1927.

There was snow on the Croce d’Aune pass when Campagnolo suffered a puncture. In those days wheels were secured by wing-nuts, which saved the need to carry a spanner because they could be loosened by hand. But not by a freezing hand, as Campagnolo found out. Fumbling, the nuts wouldn’t budge, and with no service allowed in races back then, he had to abandon.

Tullio swore to find a better way to secure a bike’s wheels and by 1930 he had developed a lever-operated quick release with the same basic design as quick-releases have today. It was his first patent, and in 1933 he founded his company, Campagnolo S.r.l. Innovative and, always at the cutting edge of engineering, Tullio developed over 135 patents for all sorts of components before his death in 1983. His company is run by his son Valentino today.