The Tour de France is the most prestigious race in the pro calendar and teams will have prepared their best riders to be at the peak of their fitness for the race’s grand départ. They’ll be riding their bike sponsors’ best bikes too, usually with spec upgrades on top, that up the price of a Tour bike to well over £10,000/$12,000.
The trend to total integration of cables and hoses continues, with proprietary bars, stems and seatposts on many bikes. Everything that can be reasonably made from carbon fibre will be, from the wheels down to parts of the derailleurs.
Aerodynamics plays a vital part in modern racing, so modern race bikes have aerodynamic tube profiles in place of the round tubes found on older bikes. Some bikes will be out-and-out aero models, but the last few years have seen the rise of the single race bike, one that is both light enough for the climbs and cheats the wind on the flat too, such as the new Specialized Tarmac SL7.
Every rider at the Tour de France will be on a bike kitted out with a top spec groupset with most now running 12 sprockets and electronic shifting too. While this doesn't necessarily give them a greater gear range it does create smaller jumps between the gears and allow that perfect cadence more often. Shimano Dura-Ace dominates the groupset choice, but there are also two teams equipped with SRAM Red eTap AXS and three teams on Campagnolo Super Record EPS.
The latter include the UAE Emirates team of Tadej Pogačar, the winner of the last two editions of the Tour, who'll be atop a Colnago bike again. While Colnago may be one of the most storied bike brands on the planet they're not in production at the same scale as the giants of Specialized, Trek and Giant, but that doesn't stop them, and other manufacturers too, supplying two or three road bikes and a similar number of time trial bikes to each rider their respective eight-man teams.
The Tour de France acts as a showcase for the best cycling tech and there is always a flurry of launches for new bikes and components ahead of the Tour. Here’s our pick of what’s new and trending at this year’s race.
New bike launches
The last couple of years have been a bit lean for bike launches, but this year we’ve seen a much larger crop of new bikes ahead of the Tour de France.
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The big-name bikes getting a makeover include the Trek Madone, with its radical redesign of the seat tube, which we spotted at the Critérium du Dauphiné. The design is also, according to Trek, 300g lighter and also faster than its predecessor. Also spotted at the Dauphiné were a new Canyon Ultimate and KTM Revelator.
New Trek Madone has a split seat tube design (Image credit: Getty Images)
The new Canyon Ultimate CFR comes with greater cockpit integration and a new seat tube design and D-shaped seatpost. With three teams at this year’s Tour riding Canyon bikes, it’s an important, if subtle, upgrade to a popular bike.
KTM’s new Revelator Alto will be ridden by the B&B Hotels-KTM team. It features a redesigned frame shape, one piece bar/stem, greater integration and aero profiling, bringing it more in line with the modern lightweight/aero trend than its predecessor.
Another important bike to break cover, not least because it’s in the quiver of the UAE Team Emirates squad of hot favourite for the overall win Tadej Pogačar, is the new Colnago Prototipo. The bike looks to update the aerodynamics of the team’s current V3Rs and balance stiffness and weight. There are five different prototype Prototipo frames with different carbon layups, with race testing planned to decide on which will go into production.
Colnago Prototipo is likely to see action under UAE Team Emirates (Image credit: Colnago)
Yet another all-new bike is the new Scott Foil. Its predecessor had an impressive palmares and this new bike looks to build on that with a design that Scott says is more aero, lighter and more comfortable. There’s been a lot of work at the rear to produce a design that Scott found was most aerodynamically efficient when tested with a rider in a wind tunnel, while the seatpost includes a vibration-absorbing rear section.
There’s also what looks like a new Giant Propel that we’ve spotted on retired pro Tony Martin’s Instagram page. It seems to be going the lightweight-aero route, with slimmer tube profiles and redesigned seatmast. The cockpit remains integrated but is less proprietary than with the current Propel.
The new Pinarello Bolide TT is likely to lose its camouflage on Stage One (Image credit: Getty Images)
Finally (for now), although it’s going to be the first to see action, is the latest iteration of the Pinarello Bolide time trial bike. It's already seen action under Geraint Thomas, who rode the new bike to second place on the final stage time trial at the Tour de Suisse. It has now officially been announced and will be known as the Pinarello Bolide F. A total redesign sees a switch to disc brakes and tube profiles than mimic the Dogma F road bike. It’s a hot favourite for Ineos Grenadiers’ TT specialist Filippo Ganna to ride to the first yellow jersey of the Tour in Copenhagen.
Very marginal gains
Time trials are at the sharp end of bike tech, thanks to their faster speeds than road stages and the absence of teammates to shield the GC riders from the wind. Among the go-faster tweaks for time trials, OSPW systems have taken off in a big way as a means for the pros to save a few watts. CeramicSpeed, who pioneered them, has its OSPWs mounted on the TT and road bikes of a number of teams at this year’s Tour. The combination of larger jockey wheels that turn more slowly on better bearings and the lower articulation angle between chain links are the main bearers of those gains.
CeramicSpeed OSPW Aero jockey wheels are likely to be in evidence on Stage One (Image credit: CeramicSpeed)
But now CeramicSpeed has gone one better, adding aerodynamics to its marginal gains, with the latest OSPW Aero system. With a smooth profile and a design that shields the bottom jockey wheel, CeramicSpeed says that its design will save a rider 2.5 seconds over a 25km time trial ridden at 50km/h. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but expect to see the OSPW Aero system in evidence both in the Tour’s two time trials and the road stages.
Tubeless wheel tech takes off
Tubeless clincher tyres have finally made it into the mainstream of pro bikes for the Tour, after years in the shadow of tubulars. Bahrain Victorious, for example, have now switched completely to tubeless tyres, its riders having been convinced of their efficacy by Sonny Colbrelli’s October 2021 win at Paris-Roubaix.
Both Specialized-sponsored teams, Bora-Hansgrohe and QuickStep Alpha Vinyl, are now on the latest tubeless version of the Roval Rapide wheels, which in their previous generation were only rated for use with inner tubes - an interesting story that you can read in our review of the Roval Rapide CLX II wheelset.
Latest version of the Roval Rapide CLX wheelset has gone tubeless (Image credit: Josh Croxton)
It’s difficult to tell how many teams have switched totally to tubeless without a very close look at their tyres or a chat with their mechanics. Tubs were always cited for the lower weight of the rims and their better ability to run flat. Disc brake tubeless wheels now are approaching weight parity with tubs of old, and so tubeless tech does seem to be winning over the notoriously conservative pros. It’s likely their mechanics are happy at the change too, not having to glue endless tyres onto rims before each race.
Paul has been on two wheels since he was in his teens and he's spent much of the time since writing about bikes and the associated tech. He's a road cyclist at heart but his adventurous curiosity means Paul has been riding gravel since well before it was cool, adapting his cyclo-cross bike to ride all-day off-road epics and putting road kit to the ultimate test along the way. Paul has contributed to Cyclingnews' tech coverage for a few years, helping to maintain the freshness of our buying guides and deals content, as well as writing a number of our voucher code pages.
