A day in the convoy

By John Trevorrow

Today we decided to get amongst the action in Le Tour. We dropped in behind the breakaway and floated between them and the peloton for a while before positioning ourselves amongst the team cars and press cars behind the break.

It is absolute mayhem in there. There was one row of a dozen team cars on the right, a dozen media cars on the left, four or five TdF cars mixed everywhere and about a dozen media motorbikes buzzing backwards and forwards. Oh, and another dozen police on motorbikes, just to make it even more chaotic.

Now grab that mix in your mind and imagine racing down through a tiny French village at 75 km/h with the horns blaring and the tyres squealing and you may just get a bit of the picture.

But the fun really starts when either the team cars need to service their rider, or a media car tries to move up. This means a third lane is attempted and it is hilarious to watch the dancing vehicles doing this bizarre tango. But it rarely becomes a tangle.

It's probably the best bit of organized chaos I've been a part of. It certainly gets the adrenalin pumping.

Being the driver and an old road sprinter, I loved every second of it. My journalist mate sitting in the passenger seat was not nearly as impressed. As a matter of fact he hardly said a word for the two hours we were doing the dance. I thought he may have gone to sleep. "No bloody way," he later said.