Double take: new Dura-Ace and Ultegra in depth

It’s not often Shimano’s two top electronic groupsets are compared to buses. Certainly we waited five years and two came along at once, but there’s much more to it than that: just like the original ‘omnibus’, the launch of both the new Dura-Ace R9200 and Ultegra R9100 on 31 August will make Shimano’s latest generation of Di2 shifting accessible to all and not just pro teams or those with very deep pockets.

In last week’s magazine we looked in detail at the specifications of the new groupset based mostly on Shimano’s lengthy press release. Since then we’ve got our hands on a Dura-Aceequipped bike and are able to bring you our first impressions of the new semi-wireless platform.

Over the next 10 pages we also look at the story behind the development of the new groupsets and ask Shimano’s UK distributor some key questions about the thinking behind semi-wireless, the rationale behind moving to a 54/40 chainset and dropping the classic 53/39 and why Dura-Ace