In our Tech Q&A series, we tackle readers’ cycling questions – from component upgrades to riding after injury – with help from the BikeRadar team and trusted industry experts. This time, a reader asks where Shimano's 105 groupset gets its name.
Shimano’s road groupset names always confuse me. I sort of get Dura-Ace (the internet suggests it’s a combination of ‘Duraumin alloy + Ace’) and Ultegra (likewise, forums say ‘Ultimate Integrity’), but I can’t really get my head around 105. Can you ask Shimano what it means and where it came from?
Maxim Anderson
105 is Shimano’s third-tier workhorse road bike groupset. Specced on many entry-level road bikes, it’s all the groupset most riders will ever need.
The performance isn’t up for debate, but the product name is, sitting as a seemingly meaningless three-digit outlier in a sea of Shimano’s ‘proper’ component family names. So where did the 105 name come from?
According to a Shimano spokesperson, the 105 name dates back to 1982, when the groupset became the first product developed by Shimano’s newly formed sales planning department.
“The product planning for 105 was the first at Shimano to be fully visualized and developed through formal presentations and written proposals that clearly outlined the product strategy,” Shimano explains.
Unlike Dura-Ace, which was positioned firmly as a race-focused groupset, Shimano says 105 was designed for recreational road cyclists – positioning it has maintained to this day.
“The goal was to create a name that stood apart from the existing line-up of racing components, while still fitting naturally into the broader category of sporty consumer products,” the spokesperson says.
With this in mind, the use of numbers was deliberate.
Shimano says that, at the time, numerical naming was common across a wide range of sporting products: “For a product to gain recognition and become a success in the market, its name must exist within the broader trends of society.”
Shimano had also previously used numbers to indicate price tiers, with higher numbers representing more expensive products.
However, the name 105 was chosen specifically to break away from that system.
“The name 105 was selected because it aligned with social naming trends, conveyed a sporty image, and – most importantly – stood as an independent identity that did not suggest a clear hierarchical ranking,” Shimano explains.
But why 105 specifically? Shimano was not forthcoming on this point.
Conjecture from the internet includes several wild theories – our favourite is a Stack Exchange post that suggests “105 is the reverse of 501, which came from Levi's Jeans, popular in the late 80s in Japan and matching the workhorse reliable nature of the 105.”
However, there is no definitive theory, so this particular question remains a case of ‘it is what it is’.
