While individual time trials require a level of personal optimisation that's rarely if ever surpassed elsewhere in the Tour de France, a team time trial is a different beast entirely, and involves not only getting each individual rider's set up on song, but also making sure the whole squad works as efficiently and effectively as a single unit to deliver the team (or in this case a single rider) to the line first, and with it the first yellow jersey.
We've already brought you a head to head of Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard's respective time trial bikes, but while cruising the team hotels in search of juicy tech, my colleagues on the ground found the bikes of Alpecin-Premier Tech set up with a bit of tech that has essentially become obsolete: the hub-mounted speed sensor, in this case from bike computer sponsor Wahoo.
In the current age, the GPS signal for the best bike computers is sufficient to give perfectly accurate speed readings without the need for a standalone sensor. Gone are the days of the magnet on the spokes of yesteryear, or any rotational sensors that came after. They also died off as riders predominantly ride to power, rather than speed, with the latter metric being more of a happy incidental at the end of the race or, as I like to imagine, something to gawk at in fear as the peloton rockets down the side of an Alp.
According to the team mechanics, using actual dedicated speed sensors means the riders can more accurately hold a constant speed when rolling through, rather than just riding to power, which can change as they come in and out of the draft of the rider in front of them. Dedicated sensors like this are also not affected by the signal loss that can occur with a rider being placed directly over the head unit as is so often the case in modern time trial positioning.
There will of course be a slight aerodynamic penalty, and when these sensors were more commonplace it wasn't unusual to see them placed on the rear hub for this reason, but with a disc wheel this naturally isn't possible. The team clearly see the aero penalty as being worth taking a hit on for the collective benefit. No doubt we will see more hacks in a similar vein in the coming hours and days.
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