The Dark Truth About 2025 Tour de France

Forget doping—pro cycling’s most impactful unfair advantage is hiding in plain sight. This video exposes the truth about TV motorbikes and team cars create powerful slipstreams that change races like the Tour de France, often determining stage wins.

From Tim Wellens’ 2025 victory (where Quinn Simmons was very vocal) to infamous cases involving Pogačar and Roglič, we dive into the science, history, and politics of motor drafting. With insights from wind tunnel studies, rider testimonies, and expert opinions, we explore how camera bikes can tip the scales—and why the current rules are failing.

This is a clip, if you would like to check out the full video click here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnJ4mcERkaA

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On stage 15 of the 2025 tour of France, the breakaway thunder towards Carcasson, Tim Wellins of United Arab Emirates, a breakaway specialist given freedom from his domestique duties helping team leader Togatcha. He leapt away more than 40 km from the finish. There was a really good group of chasers behind, including the American champion from Little Trek, Quinn Simmons. The group hesitated for its split second and the gap out to Wellins absolutely ballooned. Wellins will go on to win the stage. However, the drama started just after the finish line. Simmons in a post-race interview to ITV said, “The strongest guy in the best moment with the moto won today. This is the third time this week that I think moto drivers have played a little part in the victory here. It’s unfortunate, but we know this is the game of the tour. Lucky if you’re the one that gets away, you get this advantage and there’s no chance for the group behind.” And anybody who watched that stage, I remember watching it and thinking like, how is this allowed? Anybody who watched it and seeing that TV feed, seeing the motorcycle camera sitting just ahead of Wellins, giving him a pocket of still air. In his winners’s press conference, Wellins, he totally refuted this. He said, “It’s a little bit optimistic to say I won because of the moto. My legs did the work.” Yeah, that’s partially true. Many fans and even cycling journalists, they reflectively default to what about doping? When a solo move sticks or we see an incredible superhuman performance inside the Pelaton, when I chat to riders, when I chat to directors and coaches on the podcast, no one’s talking about doping anymore. The chat is different. They’re asking, “Did a motorbike just decide a stage of the tour to France?” Was the biggest performance enhancer that Sunday when Tim Wellins won? not in somebody’s bloodstream, but right there on our screens. If you’ve ever wondered how the slipstream of a motorbike actually affects a rider, whether there’s a science behind all these complaints and what it actually costs the riders who lose out, strap in because this story goes way beyond a single stage in the tour of France. You’ve heard the expression cycling is a game of marginal gains. Dave Braillesford coined this term, but it really is these days a game of centimeters and watts, tiny margins. a lead vehicle that sits a few meters in front of a cyclist. He changes the entire equation because of drag. Without wind, 80 to 90% of a rers’s power is used to push air out of the way. When a motorbike or car disrupts that air flow, the rider behind sits in a bubble of calmer air. In everyday riding, you might experience this for yourself if you’re ever riding into work or through the city center and you get some draft in behind a bus on a windy day. It feels like it sucks you along. It’s meaningful. It really matters. Research from the Einhovven University and the University of Leazge have quantified the motorbikes effect using wind tunnel tests and computational fluid dynamics. They’ve shown just how much of a slingshot effect motorcycles and cars can give. When a rider is took just a couple of meters behind a TV moto, the air resistance can be cut almost in half. That means at 54 km an hour, they’re effectively doing 67 km an hour for the same power output. A gain of around 14 seconds every minute. Even at 30 m back, the drag drops to about 12%. Roughly, we’re 2.6 seconds per minute. At 50 m, it’s still a 7% saving and more than a second per minute. And the effect isn’t limited to just motorbikes or cars in front of a rider either. A motorbike following a cyclist by a quarter of a meter reduces their drag by roughly 9% and a team car five meters behind can save around six seconds over a short prologue with that gap ballooning over longer time trials. You might remember team Indios a couple of years back or was it last season when they started stacking the team car in time trials with like bundles of spare bikes. Like no one’s going to need 12 bike changes in a time trial, but they would sit back to change that air flow. These are huge margins in a sport where winds are measured in seconds where they’re in sometimes photo finishes. The numbers above come with a big caveat, though. They assume calm winds and constant speed. Crosswinds or headwinds, they can change the effect. But the relationship that I’m talking about here is proximity and advantage. And that’s undeniable. The advantage comes from two effects. The first is called leading vehicle effect. A motorbike ahead pushes air aside and it creates a zone of lower pressure behind it. the rider entering this zone, he’s going to experience less drag, which is why the 2019 study found that a moto 2.5 m in front reduce drag by almost half. Now, secondly, we have following vehicle effect. A vehicle behind a rider reduces the air pressure that normally pulls the rider back and studies found that a team car 5 m behind can save roughly 6 seconds in a short prologue. The effect is stronger with motorcycles because they tend to get a little bit closer to the riders. The combination of these effects explains why breakaway riders try to slot into the camera motos wake when they attack and why chasers sometimes complain that they had absolutely no chance of catching the first rider to spring from a breakaway. We opened with the Tim Wellins Quinn Simmons war awards. Simmons was frustrated by missing a tour to France stage and he told ITV the day was won by the strongest guy in the moment with the best moto. He insisted the slipstream had played a massive role and noted the breakaway riders now have a new thing to consider when they’re thinking about tactics for the final. They have to time their moves to catch the motorbike. Wellins countered that. He said he attacked first and that others equally had an opportunity to attack first. Regardless, the conversation dominated the headlines and it rekindled an old debate. There have been some really high-profile instances of this type through the years. And you know what do we call it? I suppose for one of a better word, it is cheating. One of the most high-profile ones was Pagacha, the goat himself in 2023 Amsterdale gold race. This sparked massive outrage when it looked like the race director’s BM BMW drove directly in front of Pagachcha during his winning attack. Ben Healey was trucking behind and he closed in from 35 seconds, brought Pagacha back to 19 seconds. Then the BMW pulled in front of Pagacha and his lead had ballooned back out to 38 seconds again. Everyone watching this noticed and team manager Jonathan Vort called it out immediately. I think his quote was like, I mean, come on. Again, vehicles are influencing the race. On stage 19 of the 2018 tour, Primos Raglitch attacked over the call to obese and he opened the gap on all his rivals. Dutchman and one of my favorite riders at the time, Tom Dumlan. He fought hard on the descent, but he later blew up completely. In his postrace interview, he said, “I was flying downhill and eventually I got dropped on a straight part just because Primos was in the full slipstream of a motorbike.” Ruggage denied noticing any help from the moto, but the incident reignited calls for stricter distancing rules around motorbike. 2005 was the year. It was Gent Velgum. And this was the first time I really remember noticing the effects of motorbikes and sitting up and thinking to myself in a sport about fairness, this just isn’t fair. It was Juan Antonio Fletcher and he had a healthy lead going into the final until the Belgian rider Niko Mantan caught him inside the final kilometer. Now Fletcher’s team, it was Fasa Bautelli at the time. They protested and they claimed that the neutral support cars and pressed motorbikes pulled Mantan back up. Mantan denied using the cars. Race officials agreed with him, but then weirdly the driver of the car and the neutral support all got fined 400 Swiss Franks and the motorbikes got warned. It was bizarre. Fairness is such a fundamental tenant of cycling. And maybe this hurts a little bit more than it normally would for me on these topics because I’m close to it. I have friends who ride and I can see the consequences for guys I know of the these missed opportunities. Cycling for all its glitz and glamour. It still isn’t football. It’s not the Premier League. Stage winners aren’t on seven figure prize purses. Prize money and UCI points still really matter, especially to lower ranking teams. At the Tour to France, each stage winner earns €11,000 while second place takes 5,500 euro and third takes €2,800. That’s a difference of 5,500 euro between first and second. For a domestic or someone who prides themsself as a breakaway specialist whose salary might be 100,000 euro or less for the year, losing even a single stage because a moto gave their rival a second’s draft, it can mean missing out on an entire month’s salary in a single afternoon. And UCI points, they multiply the stakes. UCI points determine world tour licenses and invites. Missing a stage win can mean the difference between relegation and survival for smaller squads. Those points also influence riders contracts. a handful of extra UCI points from a stage race, it can add tens of thousands of euro to a rider’s next