Quote Originally Posted by smilingcat View Post
Oh stay in your drops unless you want to lock up your handle bar with someone else and crash.
I don't get this. In a road race, it can be more comfortable to ride on the hoods most of the time, moving to the drops for descents and corners. Plus, it can help you see a little farther ahead, unless you're a very short person, in which case, you might want to be in the drops to try to peek through below the other racers' hip level.

There's no reason you can't obtain enough lateral room to protect your bars. Unless your bars are much wider than your shoulders, you are more likely to be bumping bodies or bumping bars with bodies (like getting a hood end rammed into your butt cheek) than you are to hook your bars together before a crash is initiated (when you're already on the way down, lots of stuff can become tangled). I would worry a lot less about your hand position for protective measures than about hand position and your ability to control the bike and see what's going on in front of you. If everyone is protecting their front wheel, then they should be riding at least at bars' width with everyone else, so hooking bars becomes a minor concern.