What it takes to make the yellow jersey – Inside Castelli's new partnership with the Tour de France

Watch the Castelli video launching their partnership with Tour de France organisers ASO and you’ll see a small boy, his imagination fired, watching the stars of the late 80s and 90s, when the Italian company last supplied the yellow jersey to the world’s biggest race.

That campaign is based on Steve Smith’s experience falling in love with our sport, watching it on TV at his childhood home in Oregon. Now living in Italy, not only is Smith a strong cyclist, but he’s Castelli’s Global Brand Manager, helping launch the company’s association not only with the Tour, but all of ASO’s races.

"When you're a kid you see that and it just strikes you just like it's so big. You know it'd be interesting to see how many hands would be raised today if we asked how many people got interested in cycling because of the Tour," Smith tells Cyclingnews.

We’re speaking after the launch event for the new jerseys, eight floors above the city’s hubbub, on the roof terrace of ASO’s Paris headquarters. Listening to Smith, it’s hard to argue with what the Tour can bring to a brand.

"At the most basic level there's just that international exposure," he says. "I mean, 1.6 billion hours of coverage watched around the world, it's insane, what else can actually get that level of coverage?

"And then there's the next level on the product side, it's in our DNA, but this is another push to just make sure that we keep ourselves at the absolute forefront technologically, because clothing makes a big, big difference."

The partnership between Castelli and ASO will see the Italian brand providing jerseys for the men’s and women’s Tours de France and all their professional road races, from Paris-Nice to the Volta a Catalunya. In the one-day races where there are no leaders’ classifications, you’ll see the brand as sponsors.

So we’ll see a lot of the scorpion logo in the next few years – up to nine seasons – which is entirely the point, but while those other events will help the company its products to a wider audience, it’s the Tour which is the golden egg.

Castelli is not new to making leaders’ jerseys for Grand Tours. The brand worked with the Tour de France in the 1980s and 1990s, and while that was an age ago, it has been working with the Giro d’Italia since 2018. Coincidentally, that deal came to an end this year, the same time Santini’s deal with ASO ended, and after 18 months of talks, the new deal was done.

Who gets what?

For a clothing manufacturer, the Tour de France is a big deal when it comes to getting eyes on its brand and products, but it also means it has to deliver enough of their best kit to riders performing in the biggest race in the world.

When a rider moves into the lead of any classification, they’re given a variety of kit to see them through any preference or eventuality. First there’s a race jersey, which they’ll be expected to wear with their own team shorts, though there’ll be two weights available to cater for the weather.

Most riders race in one-piece race suits these days, and there are two weights of those available as well, with a new one issued every couple of days if the rider still qualifies to wear it. And on top of that there’s a gilet, short-sleeved Gabba jacket and a long-sleeved rain jacket.

But perhaps the most talked about piece of kit issued to classification leaders is the time trial skin suit. With the perfect fit and a suit’s aerodynamics the subject of much discussion, we’ve even seen conjecture that GC riders might avoid leading a race in order to avoid ill-fitting kit. So how does Castelli hope to ensure its suit is one that helps rather than hinders riders?

"At the top levels now, each rider has spent countless hours perfecting their suit, but if teams are being honest, there's a lot of times you can put somebody into a suit you don't know and it throws up some great numbers," Smith continues. "And our suit at the Tour de France has been consistently very fast across a very wide range of people. So nobody’s going to be racing in a poorly designed suit."

Preparations for next year’s Tours de France can begin now, with the routes published and the company able to begin making educated guesses about who might be in the race lead and need a suit. There is even the chance of the company doing some pre-fitting with likely riders.

"We've been doing this for years at the Giro, where 90% of the guys we can put our standard suit on and it fits them quite well, and we do have a seamstress available if we need to do some modifications," Smith says.

The Tour de France isn’t the only race Castelli will be providing kit for, the agreement includes all ASO’s races, and some of those have different requirements to the Tour. The weather for both Paris-Nice and the Volta a Catalunya, for example, is cooler and often wetter than your average July in France or – as the men’s and women’s Vuelta a España are also on Castelli’s calendar – in Spain during September.

Technological advancements

Castelli was around long before its first foray into supplying Grand Tour leaders’ jerseys, indeed, the company traces its history way back to 1876, when Vittore Gianni began his tailoring business in Milan, dressing football teams like AC Milan and Juventus, and even the Milan Ballet.

Its first foray into cycling was on the shoulders of Alfredo Binda, who won the Giro d’Italia five times in the 1920s and 1930s, though the company began concentrating on the sport when Armando Castelli bought the company in 1935. Ever since then, the company has tried to be at the forefront of technological advances. From silk time trial suits for Fausto Coppi in the late 40s, through the road racing skin suit Johan Vansummeren wore to win the 2011 Paris-Roubaix, to freezing, snowy 2013 Milan-San Remo, when half the peloton wore Gabba jerseys with the scorpion logo scrubbed out.

Read more: From Gabba-gate to the wrong energy gels – Why teams stray from their official sponsors, and what happens when they do

While Assos were first to use Lycra in cycling shorts, Castelli claim "the first aerodynamic Lycra shorts used in racing and sold to the public," producing coloured shorts for the first time a few years later. The company also lays claim to the first windproof jerseys and ergonomically designed seat pads.

With Armando’s son Maurizio at the helm, the company rebranded form Vittore Gianni to Castelli in the early 1970s and their scorpion logo was born. Maurizio died of a heart attack aged only 47, and in 2003 the company was bought out of bankruptcy by current owners, Manifattura Valcismon SpA, joining forces with other cycling brands Sportful, Karpos, Zoot and, more recently Tailfin.

This saw the company move to Fonzaso in the Dolomites where their products are still conceived and designed, before manufacture is completed at partner factories throughout Europe.

What it takes to launch a new line

As part of the deal with ASO, Castelli recently launched its 'Maillot Jaune' line of kit. It’s not all yellow, and even the yellow they do use is different to that which we’ll see the Tour leaders wearing next summer, but it is a good example of the kind of effort that goes into producing a new consumer line.

"There was an incredible amount of work that went into that kit," Smith explains. "Trying to make it stretchy enough, but not too much because you make it too stretchy, it starts to sag. We've always made jerseys with limited stretch on the back to keep your jerseys or your pockets from sagging.

"But we knew we wanted to fit the widest range of people with the maximum amount of comfort, we wanted to make that fabric more stretchy than we've ever done before, both in width and in length. So we've actually kind of re-engineered the way we engineer the pockets by tightening up the waistband, so we're holding the pockets from below rather than above."

You can have all the striking and innovative designs you like, but any cycling kit company must live and die by how comfortable and durable their shorts are. While Castelli’s prototyping group will put most new items through four or five internal samples, shorts take far longer.

"They have about double the total production time because so many things could go wrong by doing it wrong, we feel it a lot more, so it's obviously quite a bit quicker on a jersey than on a short. But yeah, shorts will take a good year and a half in the production cycle," says Smith, before revealing the as-yet un-released shorts he wore earlier that day went through 14 rounds of samples.

For now at least, the only bits of Castelli kit you’re unlikely to be able to buy are the jerseys the brand will make for the Tour de France and Tour de France Femmes for the next few years: "We don't think there's really that much of a market for it," Smith says.

Editorial note: Cyclingnews attended the Castelli/ASO launch on an imedia package from Castelli that included travel and accommodation. In line with our editorial standards, our coverage is independent and was not subject to review, approval or influence by the organiser or any sponsor; no favourable coverage was promised or given in return.

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