Can I fit my normal brake levers to the curves of the dropbars?

There's a few of things I think you will have problems with if you use that setup with drop bars.

• While riding with your hands in the drops is good for downhill or when you want a more aero body position to go faster, what you might possibly find is that a lot of your riding will be done on the hoods of the levers. If you don't have the correct type of hoods/levers it will be pretty uncomfortable to ride that way.

• The angle of the shift levers will be pretty extreme when mounted on the drop bars. Drop levers curve inward so they are easier to reach both from the hood position and from the drop position. Levers like these will either be too short to even reach from the drops, or they will bend out so far you can't reach them anyway. Not being able to reach your brakes when you are going fast is a bad thing. On the other hand, if you switch to actual drop levers you need to be aware that they typically don't have the right amount of leverage/pull to acceptably work with V-brakes.

• It looks like your shifters are integrated into your brake levers. I really haven't tried, but I suspect that if you mount those like drop levers, you might have to use some funny hand angles to work the shifters.

• If you move your brakes/shifters further out on the bars, you may run into some issues with the cables being a little too short so be prepared to have to do some recabling. This won't break the bank, but expect it to add some cost.

If you really want to move to a drop setup and don't want to have to replace a ton of things, you might consider sort of a compromise setup:

1. Keep your shift levers where they are on the cross bars, but take as much of the existing brake levers off that won't mess up the shifters.

2. Get a set of "cyclocross" brake interrupt levers (cheap ones can be $20 or less) and set them up in roughly the same place your levers are now, near the shifters. Make sure you get a pair that are meant to work with V-brakes. These will allow you to work the brakes from the same position on the flat bar, but you can also add an additional set of levers via a cable extension to the drops.

3. Find a set of actual drop levers with hoods, that also have the right pull to work with V-brakes, and connect them via an extension cable to the interrupt levers.

Doing it this way will easily allow you to add proper drop levers without having to mess with your existing cable lengths at all, as well as giving you at least three good hand positions on your bars that you can still get to the brakes from easily.

You can't. The reason is that drop bars are thicker than straight bars, and levers that are designed to match the 22.2mm tube of straight bars can't fit around 23.8mm that is standard drop bar size. The top of drop bars is even thicker: 26 or 31.8mm near the stem.

Yet another problem with this scheme is that, actually, riders with drop handlebars tend to spend most of their time riding "on the hoods", like this:

^{(Image source: posted to the site by Freiheit; apparently his own work.)}

This would be impossible with your brake levers because that's where the shifters are. Having multiple different places to put your hands is one of the big advantages of drop handlebars.

I had the same idea as you, but the cost do this properly by a bike fitter was 500 pounds. You also have to think about the reach from the seat to the brake lever. So from a safety point of view I would say it's a no no.