BBC R4 asks whether a Brit can really win the Tour de France

We all make up facts, every day - that's just an inevitable effect of living. What they make up are fantasies.

Here's a thought. We should rip up the M1 and M6 because of their role in road deaths, recent robberies of drivers. Maybe the ferry routes because of the abuse by smugglers. My understanding is that the high streets are dying already - making it easier for people to come into towns on multiple modes would seem to me to be a deterrent to criminality. How many drive by shootings, robbery escapes are committed by people on bicycles? This feels like a few politically motivated individuals recruiting support by "winning" a particular cause.

RE: why not remove the shops. By providing for mass motoring with free-flowing (well...) motor traffic they're already indirectly helping remove local shops... 😉

The anticyclists are stupid people who make up facts.

The CUES story seems a very odd one. It seems to have been years since it was announced yet bikes are still being sold mostly with the groupsets it was meant to replace (and it can't all be overstock, surely?). I haven't followed it closely but it also seemed quite confusing about what it actually was - one groupset but with 8, 9 and 10 speed options... surely that's three groupsets, even if you put the same name on them? And for those who do believe it's all the same, why then buy a £1200-£1500 bike if it has the same groupset (or at least the same groupset name) as one half the price. As I say, I haven't followed it closely so may have missed the point - but good marketing and communication is partly about ensuring that your core message gets through to people who aren't paying much attention for much of the time (which is surely a lot of us, a lot of the time).

Whatever the reasoning, this is good news. The problem with CUES, for me, was the gearing ratios. 11-13-15-17-20-23-26-30-34-39-45T is fine on a 1x Gravel type set-up, but for a road bike it leaves some pretty big gaps. How often would you need a gear as low as 34x45 on a road bike? I'd much rather have 11-32/11-34/11-36 options with less jumps. Maybe I'm just more traditional, as my current old 10spd Tiagra/Ultegra set-up has a 12-28 cassette and I'm used to the smaller gaps.

Apart from all the other faults with this product noted by other posters, I don't really buy the "easily transferable between bikes" line either; not only will most people have different shoes to go with different pedal set ups (SPD-SL for road, SPD for gravel/MTB) and different ride types, they also often have (I hope it's not just me) different shoes for the same bike depending on conditions. I have my "best" road shoes that only come out in the summer when the forecast and the roads are dry, if it's raining or muddy an older, more tatty pair come out. For me, this product would have to be constantly swapped between different shoes or just stay on one pair that I only use for maybe 25% of my rides, so that supposed advantage pretty much disappears.

Wouldn't a police officer issuing a ticket for a non-existent offence be grounds for more than a slap on a wrist at a job appraisal?

My suggestion is to use a dry-wipe marker. When the owner finds it and then eventually wipes it off easily, hopefully they might realise how much worse it could have been with a permanent one.

Doing some tooth counting based on the image above, the 11-36 cassette is composed of: 11-13-15-17-19-21-23-25-28-32-36. I would have preferred 11-12-14-16-18-20-22-25-28-32-36 (because the 21-23 is unnecessarily tight and the 11-13 too big), but I guess we can't have everything perfect. Shimano tends to choose cog sizes based on how well they can align all of the shift ramps and gates to make mechanically smooth shifting rather than to minimize cadence jumps.