Tech Tour de Force
It’s all in the legs, as they say – but what about the tech that helps to power the best riders to victory? T3 is invited to look at the bikes, gear and setup that make it all happen at Team Sky
On 1 July, Chris Froome and his Team Sky compadres will return as reigning champions to defend their title in the Tour de France. We all know that the riders are the ones who receive the attention when victory is achieved - but, what about the technology that goes into powering these super cyclists to win races? We at T3, ourselves avid cycling enthusiasts, were given an exclusive invite to the Team Sky Service Course to see what sort of tech goes into turning a great rider into an epic winner.
Does tech make you faster?
Eddy Merckx famously said, “Don’t buy upgrades, ride up grades,” but things have moved on since those racing days, and nowadays margins are tiny. So much so that teams and riders have to find ways to up their game. It’s no surprise, then, that a cyclist’s performance, ability aside, is largely dictated by the machine underneath them. Every year bikes get lighter (though the 6.8kg UCI limit means they can only lose so much weight), more aerodynamic and, ultimately, easier to ride.
Upon entering the Team Sky Service Course – the team’s central hub for servicing its bikes and riders in Europe – you’d be inclined to disagree with Merckx’s point of view. The 44-square-metre warehouse is in Deinze, a sleepy town in Belgium, and it’s like Aladdin’s Cave of Wonders in here – the huge space is teeming with tech and riders’ bikes hung up on one wall, proudly on display. With about seven bikes to each rider (and bear in mind, there are twenty-eight of them), or in the case of British star-pupil Froome, 13, it’s quite the eyeopener. Carsten Jeppesen, head of operations at Team Sky, wouldn’t give anything away when prodded, but we’d put the value of that one wall at an easy £2 million, at least. And that’s just the icing on the cake. The place is packed with millions of pounds worth of riding gear, spare parts (there’s a room dedicated to just tyres), technicians, vehicles and much more.
Team Sky is at the forefront of major advances in modern cycling technology, due largely to its exclusive partnership – now in its eighth year – with legendary Italian bike-building manufacturer Pinarello. By working closely with Pinarello, Team Sky can easily make performance-enhancing upgrades to its bikes as needed, in order to gain advantages in the closely fought sport. Before you ask, we’re not talking electric motors inside frames - rather, it’s legal adaptations that allow a bike, and its rider, to perform better in certain circumstances.
Case in point: in April’s Tour de Flanders race, the cobbled sections are a nightmare to ride on, thanks to the sort of bumps that could shake your fillings out - in particular the infamous Koppenberg climb, which is a 600-metre rise with an average gradient of 11.6 per cent; it’s terrifying, even for pros. In recent years, things are easier - the section has been resurfaced and widened, but technology has also moulded to its demands. Pinarello and Team Sky worked hard to make a bike to suit, and the result was the Dogma K8-S: a weapon of a bike, the ‘S’ in its name denoting the suspension built into the frame’s rear, which is designed to smooth the bumps on cobbled roads, enabling more of the tyre to be in contact with the road and making a rider faster under these conditions.
The suspension system, an elastomeric unit offering 10mm of travel from the rear chainstays, was introduced after riders were feeling fatigued due to the punishingly stiff frames they used. Naturally, it was a success - in 2015, Sir Bradley Wiggins declared it a gamechanger. In its third iteration, the suspension system – eDSS 2.0 (Electronic Dogma Suspension System) – is hydraulically dampened and fully automatic, with a head unit at the front of the bike to detect movement and adjust the rear suspension accordingly to suit the terrain. This means no pedal energy is wasted with unnecessary up and down bobbing.
And if it’s good enough for a load of old cobbles along the rocky Belgian terrain, then it’s definitely good enough for your
If it’s good enough for cobbles along Belgian terrain, then it’s good enough for your pot-holed road
local pot-holed roads. When the pros come up with something that works in races, you can bet that normal folk want a piece of the pie. The mouth-watering 2017 Pinarello K8-S (now only with disc brakes) is available to buy in the shops at a hefty price tag of about £6,000, and that’s just for the frameset. Better start saving.
In this year’s Tour de France, the pros will be taking to the course with the apex predator in Pinarello’s range: the new-for-2017 Dogma F10, a bike that T3 was able to ride with several pros around some of Belgium’s finest roads. There’s no suspension voodoo at work here, because the bike doesn’t need it for the sort of terrain it’s designed to cover. Instead, the F10
is just bloody fast, thanks to a Torayca T1100 1K carbon fibre frame that’s not only 6.3 per cent lighter but seven per cent stiffer than the F8 (the team’s outgoing race bike). It’s more aerodynamic too, thanks to a smoother, slippery frame, with the electronic shifting system neatly integrated into the build.
It’s during bike testing that the partnership between Team Sky and Pinarello really comes to fruition, and with threetime TdF champion, and general top-dog, Froome taking honours, you better believe his expert feedback enabled Pinarello to make a bike capable of leading the race.
Although the bikes make up a significant proportion of the tech on offer at the Service Course, the apparel that the Team Sky riders wear also comes into play. With about 300 pieces of clothing assigned to each person, performance is of the utmost importance. After all, what you wear determines your body’s comfort level, temperature management and aerodynamics, so the team works just as hard upgrading rider’s outfits as it does the bikes. The team has recently moved over from its partnership with British-built Rapha to Italy-based Castelli, a brand famous for its distinctive Scorpion logo and technically advanced line of clothing. Go out on a club ride with your friends and you’ll inevitably spot at least 25 per cent of riders wearing some form of Castelli adornment.
With a combination of feedback from its riders and working closely with Castelli, Team Sky now has better gear. We were able to witness its new wet- and cold-weather jacket: a ridiculously wafer-thin and featherweight jacket that not only keeps the cyclist warm and dry, but is able to cope with the huge amount of perspiration often created; it avoids the boil-in-the-bag effect that you find with the majority of heavy-duty jackets. The other secret winter weapon is something you’d expect to find at a ski resort: a heated jacket. Used only for extreme conditions, the jacket, lined with a super plush pile, is perfect for riders who have just finished, or for those who are flagging at the back near the end of the race and need an urgent boost of battery-assisted heat.
It’s not just the bigger tech that matters, however. The Service Course revels in the small details, such as the Unior tools employed by the nine mechanics on tap and the maintenance products employed by renowned cleaning brand Muc-Off. As Jeppesen points out, the Hydrodynamic lube, said to offer the best lubrication for the chain in any weather, is developed exclusively for Team Sky, and is even available to buy in the shops - a snip at £12 a bottle. So if you can’t afford a £10K Pinarello race bike, you can still get a taste of what it’s like to use their race-winning tech on your humble ride.
You can get a taste of racewinning tech on your humble ride