Hino took five tours on it in the late 70s and 80s. Inane took five more by the 90s. And by the time Patani went up to Gibby in that horizontal rain in the summer of 1998, the Italian brand had been the only serious choice for a serious bike rider for nearly half a century. And then there were the cataloges. If you were a teenager in the 70s or 80s with a bianke poster on your bedroom wall, the Campagnola catalog was the was it like porn that you actually read the pages of exploded technical drawings, crank arms photographed like jewelry, the record group set, the Nuvo record, and in 1943 the totem of them all super record. titanium bolts, drilled brake levers, the whole thing weighing less than 2 kg and costing more than most people's entire bikes. You weren't a serious cyclist if you didn't ride Campnola. That was the deal. Campnola didn't compete on price because Campnola didn't need to compete on price. The brand set itself in the same psychological category as Patique Phipe or Brunello. It was the thing you saved for sometimes for years. And then in 1973, the same year Super Record launched, a Japanese company called Shimano released its first attempt at a road group set. They called it Jurass. And nobody in Europe took this seriously at all. Nobody in the pro pelaton would even touch it because it was Japanese. They made fishing equipment. And in pro cycling in 1973, Japanese also meant cheap. Japanese meant a tourist bike. Shimano spent the next decade in the background quietly engineering. And in the early 1980s, they launched Jur Ace AX. It was an aerosshaped road group set with hidden cables and oval chain rings. This looked more like something out of a wind tunnel than those Italian cataloges. It was a massive flop. The pros hated it. The critics hated it. But Shimano learned something important about the European market in that period. Aesthetic radicalism wasn't going to fly. So they went after function instead. In 1974, they released SIS, the Shimano integrated system. Index shifting. You move the lever, a fixed click, the derailer drops the chain onto the next cog every single time. No feel required, no friction, no adjustment, no learning curve. The shifter does the work. Campnola's response was that real cyclists didn't need clicks. Real cyclists could feel the shift. And in 1984, you could just about argue that. By 1990, you absolutely couldn't make that argument because in 1990, Shimano launched STI, Shimano total integration, where the brake lever and the shift lever were combined into a single unit on the handlebar, and you shifted without taking your hands off the bars at all. Campagnola got to that integrated shifter, but it took them 2 years longer to get to the Erggo Power. And by every objective measure of feel and finish, Ergo Power was more elegant of a system than Shimano. But by 1992, the bike shops across Britain, Germany, France, and Belgium had had already stocked up on Shimano. Contracts were signed. The pro teams that mattered to the consumer market had already spec their bikes for that season. What you start to see looking at the whole thing from a 2026 vantage point is that Shimano never beat Campagnola on product. Plenty of cyclists who rode boat will still tell you the Italian stuff felt nicer in the hand. It looked nicer on the bike and it was more pleasing to work on as a mechanic. What Shimano beat Campagnola on was timing. They understood the business part of this. They got index shifting first, then to integrated shifters first. And when mountain biking exploded as a new category in the 1980s, Shimano got there first. When Campagnola's mountain bike group sets, when they finally arrived, they were heavy, they were overdesigned, and they got hammered by the critics. By 1994, Campnola actually just pulled out a mountain biking market entirely. And then there's the OEM problem. OEM means original equipment manufacturer. It means the bike brands themselves. Trex, Specialized, Giant, Cannondale, etc., etc. The companies actually selling completed bicycles to actual people. Shimano made it really easy for these brands because they deliver group sets at predictable prices on predictable timelines and they make group sets for every tier of the bike from entry- level commuter all the way up to the world tour riders. Campagnola, on the other hand, only ever really made the high-end stuff. So, if you're a bike brand building a range that runs from a couple of hundred dollars into the thousands, Campagnola can only sell you the top of the range stuff. Shimano can sell you everything. If you tune into the cycling media, you'll hear a lot about carbon bikes. But the truth is, not all carbon is created equal, and that's really what Parley is about.