Rosa Klöser’s satellite shifter placement is next-level gravel aero hackery

In most jobs, aimlessly browsing Instagram on the clock is anywhere from frowned upon (ie: Member of Parliament) to a sackable offence (bus driver/nuclear safety technician).

But in this job, it does sometimes pay dividends, as when I happened upon a short reel of Unbound Gravel and Traka winner, Rosa Klöser’s bike from The Rift, a gravel race in Iceland, something curious caught my eye.

Under her Hammerhead bike computer there was something sticking out that disrupts the relatively smooth flow of the computer mount; a single SRAM satellite shifter blip. Closer inspection, and a little more digging around on Instagram, reveals more, with a pair of blips attached underneath; one behind the other.

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Easily missed, but that’s a gear shifter under the computer. (Image credit: Rosa Klöser)

These satellite shifters from SRAM are totally wireless, and are usually placed either underneath the tops of the bars to allow riders to shift when climbing, or commonly when riding over the cobbles at Paris-Roubaix, or they’re placed in the crook of the drops for sprinters to allow them to shift up and down without having to reach for the paddles or shifter hoods.

I reached out to SRAM to see what was going on in this case, as the blips can also be used to control the Hammerhead computer screens, which it was suggested by my colleague Tom might make life easier over the rough basalt roads of Iceland. They are, in this case, being used for shifting however:

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“Good catch! It’s for the gears indeed, it allows her to shift while staying in a more aero position.”

While the UCI has banned the ‘puppy paws’ position on the road, where a rider supports their weight on their forearms on the tops of the bars, hands lolling in space over the front wheel, things are less draconian in the gravel world, and while Unbound banned aero bars years ago, riders are still free to do whatever they can to get aero on smoother sections of the course.

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Placing a pair of blips under her bike computer allows Klöser to stay in this aero, forearms-on-bars position without having to reach out to the hoods each time she wants to shift, and also likely encourages using the computer itself as a hand-hold, stabilising aid.

This isn’t a new hack for Klöser however, as interrogation of our Unbound tech gallery reveals her race bike this year for Kansas’ big day out had a single shifter installed under the computer too.