If youre new to bikes, the world of cycling can be intimidating. Which equipment should I choose? What clothes should I wear? How should I set up my bike, and where should I ride it? Its enough to make you declare, Fuck cycling, Im taking a bath:Fortunately, the cycling media is full of experts, some of whom have been testing bikes for as long as 25 years! So dont surrender to the bubbles just yet. Instead, surrender to people who know more about cycling than you ever will, because theyve been testing bikes for as long as 25 years. (Did I mention theyve been testing bikes for 25 years?)Oh, sure, some of what theyll tell you is obvious. For example, youd have to be a complete idiot to still be using rim brakes:Thank goodness virtually nobody will sell you a bike with rim brakes anymorethough theres still the danger of walking into a bike shop and encountering one with a front derailleur. You may even find yourself contemplating purchase of such a bicycle. BUT DONT DO IT! Hey, dont listen to me, take it from someone whos been testing bikes for 25 yearsyet in that time has apparently not figured out how to work one:As good as front derailleurs have got since their inception in the early 1900s, they are still too fallible whether theyre mechanical or electronic rasping the chain and still needing fiddly adjustment.Every so often you read something and wonder, Are we talking about the same thing? Like, maybe a front derailleur is something else in the UK? Because here in West Greenland it means the boringly dependable thing that moves the chain from one front chainring to another, and that you adjust once and never have to think about again. Its not a fallible device requiring fiddly adjustment, or pad toe-in for that matter:Theres a type of performative home mechanic who will wax lyrical about roadside adjustments and fixes, or the joys of pre-tensioning, cable maintenance and pad toe-in.I was like this, but Im glad Ive been able to leave such thinking behind. Its this attitude that has kept the front derailleur alive, even when mountain bikers were sensible enough to ditch the tech long ago.I mean fine, I guess with certain integrated shifters a front derailleur can be challenging to set up, but even then once you do get it adjusted you can proceed to forget about it. Plus, if you use a friction shifter, its pretty much the the most idiot-proof drivetrain component on a bicycle. Consider this utter monstrosity:This funky old front derailleur mounted roughly 20 feet too high shifts a filthy, grimy, chain between a 42-tooth ring and a 20-tooth ring every single time, and I dont even have to trim it. This absolutely should not work at all, and yet it does, perfectly. I really wish someone who has been reviewing bikes for 25 years would tell me what Im doing wrong, why the industry should stop making this component, and how I need a single-ring electronic drivetrain with a clutch derailleur and a cassette almost as large as my rear wheel instead.Maybe Id be better informed if I placed a higher premium on data collection. Just ask someone who has been hoarding it for decadestwo and a half of them, if were being precise:See, while youre fetishizing your front derailleur and your rim brakes hes quantifying the magnitude and intensity of his suckage down the teeniest fraction of a milliwatt:You can talk about the romance and purity of the humble bicycle all you want, but my decades of riding and testing bikes has taught me weve never had it so good. I want the myriad metrics my bikes sensors can transmit and mybike computercan record.You can keep your simple mechanical drivetrains and last-century tech, I want slick electronic shifting, power, cadence and speed recording, altitude tracking, and radars to tell me about traffic. I want to know everything my bike can tell me. So, bike engineers, bring it on. Im hungry for more.Though apparently hell occasionally do it pantsless:Occasionally, though, I like to have a raw-ride.At least I assume thats what he means.Speaking of data, chronological measurements dont tell the whole story. Sure, you may have been testing bikes for 25 years, but how many bikes have you tested in that time? See, the more bikes youve ridden, the more you know about bikes, even if you probably havent ridden most of them long enough to so much as wear out the chain. So when I see that someone has tested HUNDREDS of gravel bikes, I sit up and pay attention:Sadly, my own lack of knowledge prevents me from fully understanding what Im reading and seeing. For example, whats going on here?Has the elephant trunk skid returned for the gravel era?Or maybe hes demonstrating the new gravel rule of thumb that your front rotor should be three-quarters the length of your shoe. Or he could be having trouble maintaining rear wheel traction because hes ditched his saddle pack and the bike is now too light in the stern, even though hes tested bikes for 25 years tested hundreds of bikes tests bikes FOR A LIVING:Seriously, the only thing dumber than using a bike with a front derailleur is strapping your tools to the underside of your saddle. Instead, you should buy a completely new bike with a downtube storage compartment, since if your saddle bag gets wet over and over again and you never, ever unpack it then its possible that stuff can get rusty:I unpacked the pack earlier this week and the contents are pretty much totalled. The inner tube has corrosion on the valve, my multi-tool is rusted shut and the glueless patches have glued themselves together not to mention the C02 cartridge thats so corroded Im scared to use it in case it fails.So, Im left with a three-figure bill to replace whats been ruined inside a pack that, despite the claims, does let water in.I really dont understand these people who go all-in on downtube storage compartments:Like, did none of them have toys as children? Everybody knows the first thing you lose is the battery compartment cover. In a few years all these people will be use taping to keep their toolkits in there, like their $10,000 crabon gravel bike is a remote control car from Radio Shack.More importantly, he missed a real opportunity here. Instead of throwing the humble saddle pack under the bus, he could have penned a searing indictment of the post-Internet media landscape and the disappearance of the living wage. The headline could have been, Ive Tested Bikes For 25 Years and This Crappy Media Company Doesnt Even Pay Me Enough To Buy A New Inner Tube, Some Patches, and a Can of WD-40 to Free Up My Stuck Multi-Tool.I mean come on, this is someone whos tested gravel bikes since their inception. SINCE THEIR INCEPTION. Thats gotta count for something, right?At first glance I wondered why he didnt once again say that hes been testing bikes for 25 years, since the inception of the gravel bike falls well within that window. However, thinking more about it, I realized that its always possible someone could have been testing bikes for 25 years yet pointedly eschewed any and all gravel bikes. (Hey, I managed to mostly avoid them until a couple months ago.) Of course, we d know hes tested gravel bikeshundreds of them in fact, see abovebut still, its a good thing he reminded us.As for me, Ive been testing bikes since the inception of the safety bicycle. Its time we dropped listening to people. I cant wait to ditch giving a shit.