DISRAELI GEARS
This SRAM Quarz derailleur is one of the DI.R.T. designs that SRAM inherited from Sachs.
DI.R.T. (note the weird placing of the full stops) stands for DIrect Response Technology. The DI.R.T. designs were extremely innovative, with two composite knuckles, a composite outer parallelogram plate and a composite inner pulley cage plate. That's a lot of composite for the time, and it made these derailleurs fiendishly light. They also had a pretty straight cable run and a groovy curvaceous look. Finally they were Shimano compatible - which gave SRAM something to offer the majority of the market, while it gradually built the population of riders using its proprietary 1:1 actuation.
Did they change gear well? I would say that they did - although many home mechanics, who were not used to the straight outer cable run, were not careful enough about the length of outer cable required. Get this right and these gears worked well, possibly very, very, well. Get it wrong and they were dogs.
Were they a commercial success? Possibly not. They acquired a reputation for being fragile, with numerous macho dudes claiming on the, then newly fashionable, internet that they had smashed their DI.R.T. derailleurs to pieces in this way or that. I have to say that I didn't notice more smashed DI.R.T. derailleurs than smashed Shimano derailleurs, so I am mildly dubious about this claim. I do think that the DI.R.T. derailleurs looked fragile, and that plastic and pressed aluminium possibly does not look as comforting as polished or anodised aluminium forgings.
Most of all these derailleurs were not cheap (particularly the higher end ones). The biggest downside of the DI.R.T. derailleurs was that it was hard to convince customers that a plastic and pressed aluminium derailleur was a luxury item that should cost as much as one constructed of polished or anodised aluminium forgings. These derailleurs were no only light in weight, they were also light on Bling.
Despite this history, and despite the fact that it does not chime with SRAM's foundation myth, it might be true to say that there is more of the Sachs DI.R.T. DNA in, say, a SRAM X-0, than DNA from SRAM's own, contemporary, SRAM ESP 900.
The SRAM Quarz was nearly, but not quite, the top model in the SRAM DI.R.T. range. In many ways it was my favourite model. It had all the features of the top-of-the-line SRAM Plasma except for the fully demountable parallelogram - the parallelogram of the SRAM Quarz was rivetted together. However the SRAM Quarz was cheaper than the Plasma by an astounding amount. It also weighed in at a very respectable 209g and featured:
That's a lot of Sachs branding for a SRAM product. Note also that the tension pulley is branded 'Sachs', but I don't know of a Sachs derailleur with green pulley wheels - so these must have been manufactured specially for this derailleur. Finally there is the small matter of SRAM using the German word 'Quarz' as a model name, in English it is more usually 'Quartz'.
It all points to this product being launched in the very midst of the chaos of SRAM's takeover of Sachs' cycling operations.
Browse associated documents.
SRAM - Spare Parts List 1999 scan 17 of 146
SRAM - Spare Parts List 1999 scan 17 of 146
SRAM - Spare Parts List 2001 page 7, scan 9 of 76
SRAM - Spare Parts List 2001 page 7, scan 9 of 76
