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How come high end road bikes have gone from 5 speed freewheels to 11 speed cassettes, but they've never had 3+ chainrings?
We could start with Q factor - each extra chainring adds at least 10mm, and even track bikes already have more Q than is ideal.
Next there's front dérailleurs - proper transmission engineers who already think the rear dérailleur is astonishingly crude should probably be shielded from the FD for fear of their heads actually exploding, and things only get worse when you start adding chainrings. The twin-pulley, parallelogram linkage rear dérailleur was the engineering master-stroke which made gear changing less of a horror show than the preceding Osgear style changer, but front dérailleurs are still basically the same as an Osgear Super Champion.
Of course, strictly speaking it's not true to say that high end road bikes have never had 3 chainrings, since prior to the adoption of 9+ sprockets, including the 11T top which allowed a proper size top gear with smaller ("Compact") chainrings, many riders did use a triple for the more outrageous climbs in the Giro and Vuelta
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gbj_tester
rhowe
How come high end road bikes have gone from 5 speed freewheels to 11 speed cassettes, but they've never had 3+ chainrings?