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Spoiler alert: I love time trial day. But I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a bit of pressure that comes with race day tech galleries, especially when we know how well-received they are.
Of course, I can only photograph and discuss what the teams use, so really, it’s on the teams to make it interesting, but there’s definitely a nagging worry I might spend a day walking the pits and have nothing to show for it, or much worse still … I might miss something glaringly obvious.
It’s that paranoia that has me do “one more lap” … at least three times … every time, and even then, I feel I should stick around in case something pops up.
I’m sure I missed something interesting in the Monaco to Nice final daytime trial start village, but thankfully, there was still plenty on the old memory card this morning:
It didn’t look so promising early on, though. The teams were on site early, buses parked, barriers assembled, and bikes a long way away from the front of their makeshift pit boxes. Ineos Grenadiers had Pinarello time trial bikes, but I could only get close to confirm they were not the new Bolide F.Soudal-Quick Step also had time trial bikes, but from this distance they might as well not. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a little panic beginning to set in.But then, a bike parked close to the cordon between us mere mortals and, well, the perhaps immortal. Tadej Pogačar had this yellow Colnago V4Rs on show at the front of the Team UAE Emirates paddock, but of course, being a final stage time trial, he didn’t actually use this new bike during stage 21 and instead relied on the black TT1 with yellow Colnago decals we can see in the background.Bar the yellow, the bike was practically identical to Pogi’s regular but by no means stock-build V4Rs he raced throughout the Tour. That meant Enve bars …A Prologo saddle …Carbon Ti and Absolute Black upgrades throughout …And Enve wheels … although clearly, somehow had let the kids loose with the Crayola on these decals.We’ve already covered Pogačar’s TT bike in great detail ahead of the first week’s time trial stage, so we will not go over it again, but you can find that closer look at all the maximal hacks here. The only notable difference on the stage 21-winning bike was a few hints of yellow.Slowly but surely the tech picked up. Small things caught the eye, things that reveal threads I can’t resist but to pull to see where they lead. One such small thing was this Wattshop Anemoi base bar on Søren Wærenskjold’s Dare TSRF, not a frame nor base bar you see everyday, but a combination that certainly looks fast.
I think what also caught my eye was the umpteen spacers in the riser stack, the reverse wedge under the elbow rest, the taller-than-normal hand grips, and of course the aforementioned Anemoi base bar. At £1,600 for the base bar and stem alone, not to mention the additional £1,800 you’ll need to find for the extensions (price for the MKII, MKI seen here is no longer available) it’s both an eye-catching setup and eye-watering price tag.The two-piece stem and base bar offer plenty of adjustment but look as neat and as fast as an integrated setup. Overall it’s a time triallist’s dream front end, and so the eyes start to skirt around the rest of the UNO-X Mobility bikes; who else or how many others have the same pricey setup?The answer: most, but …… Not everyone. Some had to make do with a combination of stock and upgraded Wattshop components. Unfortunately, having just realised I’d somehow stumbled almost into the middle of Prince Albert’s entourage I managed to fumble the focus on the one shot of this setup, apologies to both our audience and the bodyguards.Exiting myself from the surreal scene of the Prince of Monaco entering the Uno-X team bus, I clocked a design change on some of the team’s TT bikes: While Wærenskjold’s and the other larger size Dares all had inline stem and top tube setups …The smaller sizes had this step up from the top tube to the stem (also demonstrated in the third photo up), presumably due to the head tube being too short to integrate the necessary headset components in a flush system.Both frame sizes feature the same top tube bento box-compatible mounts, but the extra space between top and bottom bearings in the larger sizes means Dare can drop the stem into that space for an inline setup.But there’s a process of looking at both frames back and forth trying to establish are they just different sizes or are they actually different frames. They feature the same bayonet-style external steerer and truncated and deep head tube.Plus, with these huge top tube-to-down tube bridging compensation trianglse, and the dropped and profiled seat stays, I was confident these are the same frame in different sizes with the smaller size requiring that stem-hugging tail to smooth the airflow onto the top tube.That close examination process throws up other little details, like this 58/42-tooth 2X chainring setup.And the Schwalbe Pro One TT tyres.Prince or no prince, it was time to move on, and as I did so, I worried the fairytale may have been short-lived. The gap between the barriers and Visma-Lease a Bike’s new Cervelo P5s was not far off that between Vingegaard and Pogačar.I jest. But even from this distance, we can see Visma have upgraded the new P5 once again from the setups we spotted at the Volta Algarve earlier in the year.
As we suspected, many of the Tour squad have now upgraded to carbon, aero-profiled, semi-customised, Vision-branded TT extensions. We’d also spotted the team using Dash TT saddles back in February, but Visma has now gone a step further and is using a Dash saddle and aero post combo, which sees the already pretty-minimal saddle ditch the traditional saddle rails to clamp directly to the top of the seat post.The bikes had shifted a little the next time I walked by, presumably after they’d been out for the pre-stage UCI positional checks. The move let me grab some drive-side shots of what certainly looks like a fast rig. In addition to the extensions and saddle setup, Visma is also using 140 mm front rotors, hardly newsworthy, but not every team could say the same, and Reserve’s relatively new 77 front wheel with 77 mm deep and 31 mm external-width rim along with Vittoria’s new Corsa Speed 29 mm.
Note also the little brake lever covers/tails filling the gap behind the brake lever where it meets the bas bar. First spotted by friend of the Collective, Zach Edwards of Boulder Grupetto, we believe are from Leap Components. They likely offer some AXS blip integration, and look much smoother and potentially more aero than the regular SRAM levers sans cover.But then, a glimmer of hope, a club-ten-esque road bike with clip-on aero bars. It’s the kind of thing we love to see, even if it might not make much optimisation sense. But unfortunately, despite waiting what felt like an age, this was as close as I got to it.So I strolled along down the line of buses and stumbled upon Movistar, who were in some ways doing the opposite by using regular-ish road wheels on a TT bike with this 858 NSW/454 NSW setup seen on Oier Lazkano’s Canyon Speedmax and others with just 454 NSW wheels front and rear. That’s especially surprising given Zipp just launched a new Super 9 disc earlier this year. This wheel switch could have saved around 300 grams which might have been worth somewhere around 3-5 seconds over this time trial course, a savings potentially outweighed by the aero gains from a full disc. Of course, there could be another reason the team made the switch: potentially the riders prefer the handling of an open wheel versus a disc on a stage with some proper descending.A closer look at that wheel choice. Lazkano and others had these neat extensions.The extensions are overall quite similar but it seems riders have options to tweak hand grips and other aspects of the extensions.Speaking of mixed wheels, we spotted a selection of front-wheel options on Israel-Premier Tech’s Factor Hanzos, including this new Black Inc Tri-Spoke, aptly named the “Three” or simply the “3.”The 66 mm deep rim has a 31.6 mm external width and “Kamm tail design,” a variable cross-section in its Kamm tail design from rim to hub.”But not every rider was opting for the new wheel, possibly due again to a few hundred-gram weight penalty. Some had opted for the new 62 rim first covered in a tech gallery during week one of this year’s Tour …… While others were still running the old Sixty.Factor and Black Inc have these light weight but slightly less integrated TT extensions. Having tried these extensions and attempted to make an angled riser for the elbow pads, I can appreciate the effort gone into this combination. In its stock configuration, the extension mounts flat to the base plate, and the armrest mounts flat to the extensions, but this rider has both the armrests and the actual extensions angled. Note he also has a chunk of the base plate cut off, trimming it down to just the required width. I’d considered that but wasn’t brave enough to try. Then out of nowhere, having spent far too long waiting for it, that Trek came to me. Again, likely on its way back from the UCI check, we finally got a closer look at Giulio Ciccone’s new Madone in TT spec. We spoke to people at Trek who confirmed the road bike with deep front wheel, TT disc rear, and clip-on extensions was not the optimal solution for this stage, but Ciccone had been carrying an injury and would have been unable to produce power in the TT position on the climbs. As such, the plan was to get him to the top of the climb as best as possible, then get on the TT bike for the fast drop into Nice, where a TT bike was unquestionably the right bike even with a significant drop in power. The clip-on aero bars are only an option because Ciccone races with a two-piece bar and stem, with the bars featuring a round clamp section wide enough to accept the extension mounts. Had he been racing with an integrated handlebar and stem it either wouldn’t have been possible or would have required a handlebar change. There is something very cool about TT-optimised road bikes, such setups take me back to my early days in cycling and the Tuesday and Thursday evening club 10-mile time trials. And that’s perhaps a nice place to wrap up part one in this series of Tour tech galleries.
