During last week’s Geek Warning podcast, Dave Rome and I took a closer look at spy shots of what appears to be a brand-new 13-speed wireless road groupset from Campagnolo. The groupset was first reported by Cory Benson of Bike Rumour on a Cofidis team bike at the Eschborn-Frankfurt WorldTour race on May 1st, and while official details are thin, those photos, and others obtained by Escape Collective since, offer a lot to unpack.
At first glance, the system looks like an evolution of Campagnolo’s current Super Record Wireless groupset launched just two years ago, but with a clear jump to 13-speed. That makes it the first electronic road group from Campagnolo to go beyond 12-speed, a move that brings the road line closer in line with the brand’s 13-speed Ekar gravel groupset, though the cassette is clearly a road-focused design, not simply an Ekar-esque fish out of water.
Perhaps most interestingly, the levers on the Cofidis bikes spotted by Bike Rumour look identical to the existing 12-speed SR WRL offering, but photos emerging from the Giro show an entirely new lever which includes the return of the thumb shifter button on the lever side body. We'd first heard rumours of a return of the thumb shifter last summer, and it seems those rumours are all but confirmed now.
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