DISRAELI GEARS
The Campagnolo Victory was a tidy looking object, created to replace the legendary Campagnolo Nuovo Record with a derailleur with a more 1980s style.
But somehow it did not quite have the quality of finish required to succeed in that role. Perhaps the expectation was impossibly high - for some years the Nuovo Record had not really justified its stellar reputation - but even that doesn't excuse some of the Victory's more cynical weaknesses. The inside parallelogram plate was often poorly polished - as were the inside surfaces of the pulley cage. And then there was the over-complex system for adjusting the swing at the b-pivot. SunTour had been showing how this should be done since the 1960s - but Campagnolo had to reinvent the wheel with something just slightly worse.
This is a pleasant example of the first iteration of the long cage Victory design. This model is sometimes referred to as 'Victory Leisure' as it is kind-of-labelled as such in the 1985 Campagnolo's catalogue n. 18 bis. What is unarguable is that it is given the part number 0102047 in that catalogue. Its most distinctive feature is the plastic layer embedded in the outer parallelogram plate to prevent the adjustment screws from loosening.
Some key features of this second style of Victory are:
