Never rode a recent road bike, I never liked road bikes.
I did several 30 miles road rides on my MTB. For the hand problems, good
gloves and bar ends do the trick for me. With the bar ends I can changes the
position of my hands to prevent them from getting numb.
As for the brakes, the V-brakes are very powerfull in the woods even on very
steep hills. But above certain speed 25 mph (going down a hill on pavement)
they don't break as well as I would like them to. For my next MTB I'll go
with disc brakes.

"Alan Hoyle" wrote in message
...
I'm in the market for my first road bike. I currently use a '94 Trek
970 mountain bike with slicks for commuting (3 miles) that I've
upgraded several times over the years (notably XT V brakes, Rockshox
FSX carbon fork, and a few other things) but I've been doing some
slightly longer rides and have found it uncomfortable, particularly my
hands get numb after a while.

So, I've been test driving a few road bikes. While they have all
seemed to be more comfortable and seem more efficient, the brakes have
invariably seemed to be far less powerful than I'm used to. Is this
universal for road bikes? Is there any way to make them stop faster?

-alan


--
Alan Hoyle - - http://www.alanhoyle.com/
"I don't want the world, I just want your half." -TMBG
Get Horizontal, Play Ultimate.