How Many Bikes Does A Tour De France Team Have?

💙Contains paid promotion for Van Rysel💙
Liam goes behind the scenes with the Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale team, giving you a sneak peek behind the curtain of the 2025 Tour de France.
We see inside the mechanic’s truck before getting a rare tour of the team bus. Liam checks out the team’s Van Rysel RCR-F race bike and gets acquainted with the Skoda team car. His tour finishes with his favourite vehicle, the food truck.

Hello and welcome to the tour to France. This is an exceptional day for me because I get to do what all bike nerds want to do. We get to have a look behind the scenes at a team. This is Pierre from Decathlon AG2R Lamondial team and he has kindly agreed to show us behind the scenes. Pierre, thank you so much for doing this. I’ll start with the basic question. How many bikes do the riders have? Cuz we saw them rolling out and there’s eight riders. Yeah, eight riders. quite a lot of bikes because each rider got four bike forward bike. So it’s 32 bikes. 32 bikes and then two TT bike for each guys. Yeah, the TT bike just sitting behind us. And so the your road bikes, uh the Van Resol RCRF is is the main road bike for the opening stages. That’s coming in at about $12,000. So, some quick mental maths that I definitely didn’t do on my phone 5 minutes ago puts that at about $570,000 worth of bikes. Pierre, should we uh start in the mechanics truck because I I wouldn’t usually be allowed in here, but because we’re we’re the team. So, along this wall here, we’ve got a few of the RCRs. We miss quite some bikes because guys just went for a while. We miss like 16 bikes. But yeah, everything is there. We also have another little truck with all the TT bikes because the TT bikes don’t stay with us doing the wall tour. Just came for stages and then get back to Shberry. Along this wall we’ve got the RCR Pros. So these would be I would say the allrounder bike. Definitely a great I’ve actually reviewed this um and it’s fantastic to ride. uh you can build this down to like the UCI’s minimum weight limit of 6.8 kilos. So with that and the aero tubing, it really does fly. And also the the optimization of the Swiss side wheels, that all combines to make something that’s really fun to ride. What are we seeing here? What do the mechanics have set up? Have we got some tools over over here? So, this is a fantastic little look into what the amount of stuff that goes into keeping a pro cycling team on the road. Uh, Pierre, can we just have a look in some of these drawers? Yeah. Oh my lord. So, those would all be Shimano. Uh, not the MT, the CL 900 rotors, the newest ones. Yeah, we have the I love the look. Wow. So, what’s what’s this? The the Kio grip. So, if you’ve ever gone through a set of cleat, you’ve probably needed this many cleats. With all of the bikes and all of the riders, then we’ll need bar tape. I’m not going to lie, I need some bar tape for my for my bike at home. So, I think I think we could um down here there’s a there’s a word here that excites me greatly because if this is full of derailers, it’s not. Oh, it kind of is. So, all of those are derailers. I mean, we we’ve spoken already about the expense of like a I don’t want to load this one, but D2 rear derailers are about £400 a piece. So, thanks, Shimano. Thank you, Shimano. Yeah, definitely. But all of the interesting stuff like the the olives and the barbs and just you know all of these chains and stuff these pro riders you know especially with the tour with the you know 200 km stages each day the the lifespan of a chain is is very very small and then down here that looks like saddles to me. Saddles and bottle cages. I’ve never in my life seen that many bottle cages. That’s fantastic. and all of these saddles from physique. There we go. Okay, so moving up here. I don’t think my brain can count this high for how many wheels you have. Do you know Do you know roughly how many wheels you have? That’s like 70. Yeah. 70 wheels. 70 wheels. 70 pair of wheels, sir. 70 pairs. Okay. So, 70 wheel sets and these seem to go from the the deepest sweet Swiss side wheels. We use the Aero tire on the front wheel and the GP500 on the back wheel. Yes, cuz this only comes as a 26 mil tire, which is quite narrow by today’s standards. But with all of that kit up there and then, you know, we’ve just got another pile of bikes down here. Would these be the um fourth bike? The fourth bike? Yeah. This one will stay in the truck and if we have anything amazing. Okay, so we’ve got Felix G’s RCRF. So, this is the Aerobike. This is the one that they’ll be using on the flatter stages to just help them go as fast as possible. So, we’ve got the integrated front end. Look at the head tube depth as well. This is super deep. They’ve gone as deep as possible and they want to make this airflow around here as clean as possible as well. That’s why as well we’ve got the 680 wheels as well. These are super deep from Swiss side. And then we’ve got a combination of a GP 5000 STR tire up here and the Continental Aero tire up at the front. Felix has a full Jura Ace group set. So, this bike is fully blinged out with a physique saddle and everything. I love this thing. I rode this on the cobbles of Rube, which was an experience. Quite bumpy. Don’t do it. They are just over there. But this thing is all about taking Felix through the opening stages and getting him to the mountains as fresh as possible. Most of what makes this bike really fast is the rider. Obviously, these guys are so strong and he is pushing some massive gears. 56 44 chain rings and that looks like an 11 to 30, maybe a 32 to cassette up at the back. That makes my knees shake. That would be so difficult. But yeah, some big gears up here. So, one thing while we’re just going to the team bus, I love this. They’ve got the list of the names of the riders that are in the tour to France. A lot of the team buses, they go for all of the names kind of plastered all over the sides, but they’ve just got their tour team listed down here, so you know exactly who’s racing. Okay, so fantastic news. Pierre has got us VIP access into the team bus. So Pierre, I’ll let you lead. Thanks. Um, do I I wipe my feet? Definitely. We don’t want to get in trouble with Bruno D. No, absolutely not. We we like to say that this is their house for 3 weeks. That’s also why we don’t really want that much people in there because we change hotels almost every night and this place is always there. So yeah, this is our second house. And as well cuz I know, you know, being in the media, the tour to France is a circus. It’s chaos. And this, you know, you step in here, it’s a sanctuary. It’s very quiet. The bus is a safe place. Like always quiet. You can put some music, watch the TV. We got the tainted windows, so just Yeah. But also these these chairs look fabulously comfortable. If you want to try uh this one this one here. So if I’m Oh, I’m Yes. I’m ready for a very long bus transfer. If they could put these on like Ryan Air, you know, your standard L rolls. You’ve got to have them. Oh, and they’ve got a little bit of cake for later. is also cooking a bit for the guys. Just back here, we’ve just got like this is like the meeting room where the boss says I just like to say you probably you you don’t want to be breeding ruler now. Come on. Like actually the writing in there is fantastic. Anyway, so this is uh where the guys would just have meetings or uh spot. This is like this one is for the writers and this one is for sports for directors. Okay. So yeah, they stay here before the stage after stages do some meetings. We also get one TV here to put on PowerPoint or even watch a stage or watch the finish and uh bit of Netflix with the with the tour documentary. Maybe not. So, hidden away in here with these kind of roller shutters is the sun cream cabinet and they got the kids stuff, the factor 50 plus. Because if you’re out on the bike for 5 6 hours a day, you probably want to be well protected, especially the French summer. Very sunny, right? Should we head down and look at maybe one of the team cars. Okay, so now we’re going to step into the team’s SCOD Superbs. And I think Scodas are superb because I have one. Mine isn’t as fun as this though. This is actually a DS car. So I think this is DS2. So, this would be the car that goes over to the breakaway if Decathlon AG2R get a rider into the brake for the day. And it’s got all the things I need. And these gels aren’t for me. These are for handing out to the riders. We’ve got some of the um some of the beta fuel gels and stuff from Science in Sport. They just get passed out of the window. But there’s so much more going on in here. Um there’s a lot of tech. So, this is for an iPad. You get vevel viewer which basically shows you the race as it’s unfolding. So what point the riders are on, if there’s a mountain coming up, if there’s a sprint point. So the DS is fully informed about where the riders are, what’s coming up. They can also get on the TV the race so that it can see what’s happening. And then they’ve got these things and yes, they are walkie-talkies. And then whatever information needs to be communicated to the riders gets done on this. So I can I can get Felix G on the radio and tell him to attack and then he’ll ignore me. But yeah, this is fantastic. And if you want a space to spend well 6 hours, probably it. But there’s more to this car than meets the eye because up on the top, as you can probably see, is all this stuff. Now, some of these are, you know, radio masts and stuff to get the signal for the TVs and all the radios, but these things, roof racks, they are what they say they are. These are for carrying the bikes. And these are specially designed for the team cars. So, I think you can get like eight bikes. Eight bikes. So, one bike per rider on the top of here, which is fantastic. And then if we pop round here, we should be able to see, this is going to be where the mechanic sits. And this, you know, obviously we’re not in the race yet, so this will be loaded with stuff. So the mechanic will have a full tool kit in the back. They’ll also have spare wheels on hand so that they can get out the car with a wheel in their hand or two wheels in their hand so that when they get up to the riders, if there’s been a crash or a puncture, they can change that so so quickly. They generally sit on that side so that they can have um an ey line to the DS, but also they can stop on the right hand side because we’re in France. The cars pull over on the right hand side, they jump out and then they’re safe. They’re not doring some other cyclist or another team car. I love these team cars. These are fantastic. What’s What’s in the boot? Probably nothing. Right now at the moment nothing but for the race we’ll have u like all the bottles, all the bons. Uh also some spare wheels because all the spare wheels will be next to them. But we can also have an extra one. Yeah. Von, some food because the guy will stay for the whole day in the the car. So some food for them. A little baguette for the for the guys in the car. Amazing. We’re going to talk about food in a bit because there’s some really interesting stuff that goes on behind fueling a team. But for first, I want to ask you, how many bottles do you guys get through in a race? I don’t want to say anything stupid. A lot. A lot of them. Far too many. And then the final thing that I wanted to show you because this is a treat. It takes a lot to feed a Tour to France team. So, Pierre, can you show us the team’s uh truck? Tell you what, I’ll go around to the window. You go inside and I’ll order something. I’d love a bacon sandwich. This isn’t going to work. I’m not tall enough, but I’d love a cup of tea. Sorry, we’re close. We’re closed. I’m seeing a few little strawberries over here. This would go very well in in uh England right now. Now, this might be the dessert of today. Perfect. What you want to do with this is you want to get yourself in a sunny tennis court and eat that with cream. Yep. Fantastic. And a bit of uh bit of champagne. Fantastic. I’m seeing a very functional space. Um yeah, we don’t have that much space, so everything needs to be very efficient. We designed it quite a few years ago, but it’s still This has been a fantastic place to end because I really do need some lunch now. Yeah. Thank you so much for showing us around. That’s been a real treat, mostly for me and my absolute bike nerd dreams. If you like this video, remember to like and subscribe and follow along for more Tour France content. That should just be right up here. Apparently, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.