In track racing and other sprinting, narrow bars and wide elbows make getting into gaps between riders easier and safer. There were definately different schools in this as even in 6-day era bikes, widths vary greatly.
Joe Bender-Zanoni
Great Notch, NJ
> Chuck proposed:
>
> "Tim, you can get use to 39cm. And besides, don't you
> remember the
> saying on the New York fashion runways, "You have to suffer
> for fashion,
> Darling!" Can apply to bicycles too...
>
> Chuck Schmidt
> SoPas, SoCal"
>
> Chuck, I could not disagree more with this statement. Well,
> ok the first line...the rest, about suffering, I agree with,
> as in, narrow bars make for suffering. Bars that are too
> narrow (and 39 c-c bars are too narrow for almost everybody,
> imho), offer no upside whatever, and make for some real
> disadvantages. Every time I put another 42cm c-c bar on a
> bike I breath a big sigh of relief. I have 44" shoulders,
> and 39cm bars are like a weird form of torture for me.
> Steering is lousy, leverage is lousy. Everything is lousy
> about them.
>
> Why narrow bars on so many of the classic road bikes, even
> the taller ones? I'm gonna take a wild guess at two
> reasons, someone please fill me in otherwise: 1) narrow
> bars make for more room in the peleton. An ancient
> justification, hard to accept given the advantages of
> leverage provided by wider bars, esp. climbing hills. 2)
> for a lot of years, most (not all, but most) European pros
> were tall, skinny guys, or just skinny, with modest shoulder
> width, and they could tolerate those ridiculous narrow bars.
>
> Ok, fire away! Nobody's gonna change my mind though. I'm
> with GP on this one: wide bars good, narrow bars bad.
>
> Charles "where's my 44" Andrews
> SoCal