Tour de France tech gallery: Four new bikes, $1,700 hubs, brand new wheels, and a $1,400 saddle

While the Tour de France isn’t necessarily the best race on the planet for spotting new road tech – for that you want the Critérium du Dauphiné – it is still the biggest bike race on the planet by a considerable margin, and teams always use the best gear they can lay their hands on to try and eke out a tiny advantage over the competition.

This year the race had an ace up its sleeve for tech nerds, though: An uphill time trial. We haven’t been treated to one in years, and they are always an absolute feast for tech nerds, with a huge variety of setups from pure lightweight machines to modified TT bikes. For this reason, we’ve held back our usual tech gallery for an extra week to pack it with even more tech, including four new bikes that are yet to hit the market.

What follows below is a gallery in two parts. There’s the initial, ‘normal’ tech from the days before the race and the opening stages, including some brand new bikes, some special Tour de France paint schemes, and the usual array of interesting hacks and mods, and then I’ll dive into my favourite bits from the uphill time trial that set the work group chat ablaze.