The Campagnolo Super Record was the ultimate derailleur of its time. All sorts of outrageous claims were made for it - the aluminium was some sort of super special alloy, the black anodising was some kind of super special coating, the supposedly new geometry was the ultimate expression of something or other that was going to give the ultimate gear change etc. etc... One colleague of mine once explained that Campagnolo was the only company in the whole wide world that could work with ‘magnetesium’ - which was fortunate as making products from a non-existent material must be the ultimate example of niche marketing.

The truth is a little more mundane. The knuckles are exactly the knuckles from the Nuovo Record. The aluminium used is exactly the alloy used in the Nuovo Record. Black anodising is - wait for it - black anodising. The parallelogram plates are restyled in a 1970’s kind of way, but are geometrically identical to those of the Nuovo Record.

The real technical differences from the classic Nuovo Record are:

• the use of exotic material for the two large allen key bolts.
• a bigger ‘flange’ on the pulley cage to push the chain onto low gears.

The exotic materials certainly lowers the weight. The changes to the pulley cage help, but do not improve the desultory change onto the high gears that was a bit of a problem with the Nuovo Record - and remains so with the Super Record. Of course the biggest ‘improvement’ was that the Super Record inexplicably cost nearly twice as much as the already insanely expensive Nuovo Record.

But despite debunking Campagnolo’s (and the horde of Campagnolo groupies’) myths, the Super Record remains something special. Like a £10,000 Leica camera that, in the real world, takes a marginally less sharp hand-held, street, photo than a £500 Sony with image stabilisation, function does not tell the whole story. The Super Record feels great in your hand, has a timeless look, and seems valuable simply because it was once so ludicrously expensive. It’s hard to define what makes a classic - but whatever it is the Campagnolo Super Record has it in spades.

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I believe that this example is a later version and dates from 1985. Some of its distinguishing features are:

• The b-knuckle is not stamped with any letters or numbers.
• The b-pivot and p-pivot allen bolts are titanium.
• The logo is painted onto the flat outer parallelogram plate.
• The parallelogram spring is mounted on the inner p-knuckle parallelogram pivot.
• The inner parallelogram plate has a flat surface with no writing on it.
• The outer pulley cage plate is the 'improved' shape, but is directly bolted to the p-knuckle without an embedded nut
• The pulley bolts have screwdriver heads and are held in place by titanium nuts at the outer pulley cage plate.

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• Derailleur brands: Campagnolo
• Categories: Campagnolo - the good stuff
• Themes: Ultra-lightweight - road racing models
• Country: Italy
• Date of introduction: 1985
• Date of this example: 1985 (not stamped with any reference to 'PATENT')
• Model no.: 4001
• Weight: 182g
• Maximum cog: 28 teeth (bike shop folklore)
• Total capacity: 26 teeth (bike shop folklore)
• Pulley centre to centre: 46mm
• Index compatibility: friction
• Chain width: 3/32
• Logic: top normal
• B pivot: unsprung
• P pivot: sprung
• Materials: aluminium with titanium used for both large allen bolts and for the nuts on the pulley bolts