eBikes Blog
Life behind bars | Aero is every thing for cockpits on the 2023 Tour de France
Jul
For those who have been taking note of our tech protection of this 12 months’s Tour de France, you will have observed extra riders than ever are adopting excessive cockpit setups.
Whereas a lot of the speak at this 12 months’s race has been of 1x drivetrains, vast tubeless tyres and riders switching to (barely) lighter bikes, it’s simple to miss the altering nature of professional entrance ends.
Professional riders are sometimes cited as being pretty conservative in terms of new bike tech, however preferences on handlebar widths seem to have shifted quickly in recent times.
So, with the mud deciding on one other Tour de France, let’s check out the front-end setups of a few of the greatest names within the bunch, and contemplate what they may inform us about the place issues are heading with street handlebars.
Have the professionals been studying my articles?
Given the frequency and quantity with which I’ve evangelised about the advantages of slender handlebars, it’s tempting to surprise if the professionals have been frequenting main multi-discipline biking web site BikeRadar in recent times.
Whereas I hope they’ve, it’s extra possible they’ve as a substitute been taking note of the rising variety of efficiency engineers and consultants many professional groups now make use of.
The likes of Dan Bigham (efficiency engineer at Staff Ineos-Grenadiers), Dr Ciarán O’Grady (efficiency coach at Israel-PremierTech) and Casper von Folsach (efficiency coach at Staff Uno-X), for instance, are tasked with serving to riders be as quick as attainable on the bike.
Usually, these roles embody overseeing a broad spectrum of rider efficiency, from coaching, restoration and vitamin, by to optimising gear and dealing with workforce sponsors to develop new merchandise.
With slender handlebars having grow to be mainstream in observe biking in recent times (they have been a key development on the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, for instance), it’s no shock to see the likes of Bigham and Folsach – each of whom have been beforehand concerned with the Danish Olympic observe biking workforce – bringing these concepts into street racing.
Whereas the calls for of street racing are undoubtedly completely different from these of observe racing, the need to experience as quick as attainable crosses over neatly, in any case.
And with consultants comparable to Dr Xavier Disley of AeroCoach saying the financial savings quantity to round 2 watts per 10mm narrower you go (in keeping with his testing at 45kph), it’s clear there have been some simple beneficial properties obtainable for a lot of riders.
Cockpit setups on the 2023 Tour de France
Simply as with final 12 months’s race, there seems to have been a transparent development in the direction of lengthy and slender cockpit setups inside the professional peloton.
Actually, the commonest handlebar widths we noticed have been 36cm and 38cm.
There didn’t look like a correlation between rider top and bar width, both, as we see with bikes offered to customers (the place bar width sometimes will increase in keeping with body dimension).
Slender bars dominate
AG2R-Citroen’s 1.88m-tall GC rider, Ben O’Connor, for instance had a 36cm-wide handlebar paired with a 140mm stem on his prototype BMC aero bike.
Alexis Renard, of Cofidis, additionally comparatively tall at 1.84m, was utilizing a 38cm-wide handlebar paired with a 140mm stem on his new Look 795 Blade RS.
It’s usually claimed wider bars are helpful for growing leverage when climbing or sprinting, however a few of the star names at this 12 months’s race don’t seem to thoughts the potential trade-off.
Yellow jersey winner, Jonas Vingegaard (Jumbo–Visma), and his nice rival Tadej Pogačar (UAE–Staff Emirates), had 38cm-wide and 36cm-wide handlebars on their respective bikes, for instance.
Egan Bernal (Staff Ineos–Grenadiers) and Richard Carapaz (EF Training–EasyPost) have been additionally each utilizing 38cm-wide handlebars.
Uno-X Pro Cycling’s sprinter, Alexander Kristoff, was also running a 38cm-wide handlebar, paired with a 120mm stem, while Lotto-Dstny’s Caleb Ewan had a 36cm-wide bar.
For these riders, the improved aerodynamics of a reduced frontal area, coupled with the ability to more easily manoeuvre through the bunch, will likely be the primary motivations for opting for a narrower bar.
While we saw one 42cm-wide handlebar at last year’s race (on Chris Juul-Jensen’s Giant Propel Advanced SL), this year we didn’t see anything wider than 40cm.
The 40cm bars we did see belonged to Mark Cavendish of Astana–Qazaqstan, one of the veterans of the bunch, and Mathieu van der Poel of Alpecin–Deceuninck.
As many other riders now do, van der Poel tilts his brake hoods in slightly for a narrower effective hand position at the hoods.
Of course, we didn’t measure every bike in the bunch, so this doesn’t mean 42cm (or wider) handlebars have disappeared completely from the pro peloton. They aren’t being used by many of the big names in the bunch anymore, though.
Long stems for life
Rangy stems, which help riders get stretched out and adopt more aerodynamic riding positions, were also ubiquitous, even on the bikes of shorter riders. No change there, then.
Despite being the second shortest rider in the race, at 1.65m-tall, Caleb Ewan uses a 140mm-long stem.
Cavendish, at 1.75m-tall, used a 130mm stem.
Taller riders in the bunch were also invariably using long stems, with O’Connor and Renard selecting 140mm options.
The BikeRadar award for the Longest Stem at the 2023 Tour de France goes to Israel-Premier Tech’s Simon Clarke, who had an enormous, 150mm-long example on his new Factor 02 VAM.
Paired with a 38cm-wide handlebar, that’s a very pro setup – long and narrow.
Stem lengths of 140mm and 150mm are rarely (if ever) specced on even the largest bikes sold to consumers.
In contrast, the shortest stems we saw were around 110mm – ‘short’ only by pro cyclist standards, because it’s a fairly standard length for a size-large road bike.
Despite their differing statures, both Carapaz (1.70m) and van der Poel (1.84m) had 110mm-long stems on their bikes.
For van der Poel, that 110mm stem, combined with his 40cm-wide bar, means the Dutch superstar had the kind of setup you could see on a weekend bunch ride. Not every rider has an extreme, pro-only cockpit.
Integration is now the norm
While it was no surprise to see fully integrated cockpits on the aero road bikes used at last year’s Grand Départ, one-piece setups have now colonised almost every bike in the peloton.
In contrast, two-piece front ends were rare.
The Specialized S-Works Tarmac SL7, Giant Propel Advanced SL and Look 795 Blade RS were the only bikes on show with such setups, and there are even caveats there.
A few Specialized-sponsored riders were running Roval’s new Rapide integrated cockpit at this year’s race (a handlebar we believe may form part of the Specialized Tarmac SL8, at some point in the near future), for example.
The recently launched Look all-rounder also uses a proprietary stem and handlebar, which though separate to allow for sizing swaps, integrate together exceptionally cleanly.
Bikes with exposed cables, however, such as the venerable Giant TCR – once considered among the most radical bikes in the peloton – were nowhere to be seen at this year’s Tour.
Is this the end of the road for the Giant TCR? Unless Giant updates it with fully integrated cables, or the UCI lowers its minimum bike weight limit, we may have seen the last of this iconic bike at the Tour.
With the latest Giant Propel ticking both the lightweight and aero boxes, and flirting with the current UCI weight limit of 6.8kg, could Giant reposition the TCR in a similar role – too light for the pros – to the Specialized S-Works Aethos?
Of course, many of the bikes used by Tour pros, such as the Cannondale SuperSix Evo, Pinarello Dogma F, Colnago V4Rs and more, are compatible with both integrated cockpits and non-integrated options.
This is handy, because integrated cockpits can make optimising a bike fit tricky and/or expensive for everyday riders.
With a range of options to choose from, and a fleet of professional mechanics at their service, that’s not something your average Tour racer needs to worry about, however.
Where do we go from here?
Considering the pace with which the 42cm-wide handlebar appears to have been abandoned, the question remains – have we reached peak narrow handlebars?
Given quite a few riders were running 36cm-wide bars at this year’s race, it might be tempting to conclude that we’re nearly there.
After all, that’s only 1cm off the recently mandated, UCI minimum handlebar width of 35cm for road racing.
However, as we noted at the time of the rule’s introduction, this regulation leaves room for brands and riders to push the envelope even further.
A handlebar needs only to be 35cm wide outside-to-outside, which leaves the possibility to have a flared handlebar with 35cm-wide drops, but a much narrower position at the brake hoods.
Notably, a few brands are already taking advantage of this.
AeroCoach’s Ornix road handlebar, for example, measures 37.5cm wide at the drops, but just 32.5cm wide at the point where the shifters attach.
The Ribble Ultra SL R also has an option for its radical integrated handlebar with 37cm-wide drops and a 33cm-wide shifter position.
As you’d expect, both brands promise these handlebars offer significant performance advantages compared to more standard options.
AeroCoach claims the Ornix handlebar can save a rider 4.7 watts versus ENVE’s SES aero handlebar (in its narrowest 35cm width), when riding at 45kph, and an enormous 21.4 watts compared to a standard, round 42cm-wide handlebar.
Of course, sponsorship restrictions, as well as the fact that some pro bikes (such as the Canyon Aeroad CFR) simply aren’t compatible with third-party handlebars, mean we might not see this exact handlebar used at the Tour anytime soon.
We wouldn’t be surprised if the big manufacturers take inspiration from progressive designs such as this one, though, especially if their sponsored teams are requesting similar designs.
Trek, for example, adopted a flared handlebar for its latest Madone SLR aero road bike, and ENVE confirmed its new integrated handlebar was designed with input from Pogačar himself.
Presumably, if Tadej requests an even narrower setup for next year’s Tour, then he’ll get it.
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