BAGNERES-DE-LUCHON, France — As we descend off the back of the Col du Tourmalet, a fan clasps her hands to her head, mouth gaping in disbelief at our speed. Markus Hoelgaard nearly overcooks a wet corner and unclips to stabilize his balance at the last second, with our car and two motos bearing down on him a scant few meters behind. Alexey Lutsenko raises his hand to signal a problem with his front wheel, we pull over on a negative-eight percent gradient, and Kevin Poret pops out of the back seat with a fresh wheel. I time his work from the front seat: 21 seconds.
I spent the 2025 Tour de France’s fourteenth stage inside the race, in the Shimano neutral service car. It’s the closest I could have gotten to the racing without being on two wheels. A charming property of the Tour de France is that the closer you get to the action, the less of the race you’ll see. Proximity has an inverse relationship with context. I wanted to see what it was like to have both, and to understand the work of the mechanics who are closer to the action than anyone. Luckily, I was able to do so on the hardest stage of the Tour’s Pyrenean turn, a 182-kilometer beast with four categorized climbs, each of which has its own place in Tour de France lore.
Every team in the Tour de France has two team cars, each replete with extra bikes, dozens of front and back wheels, and various disgusting yet nutritive performance slurries. But two team cars are not always enough to handle eight riders, especially on a day like Stage 14, where the Tourmalet hit the peloton like a hammer and scattered riders across the various river valleys on the day’s course. That’s where neutral service comes in. Shimano runs two motorcycles and two cars, each of which are kitted out with six bicycles, 14 wheels, and various other parts. Their job would be tricky even if every team in the peloton ran the same groupset and had the same pedals, which they absolutely do not. The 23 teams have a wild variety of specifications, which means the mechanics have to be prepared to change anyone’s wheel or provide a spare bike to a rider in an emergency at essentially a moment’s notice. The job is simultaneously a pop quiz, a mechanical engineering practical exam, and a stunt driving test.
Before the race began in waterlogged Pau, I asked mechanic Patrick Dils whether he prefers a quiet day or a busy one. “Quiet. I don’t like to work,” he joked, grinning. A few days earlier, he was unfortunate enough to get called into action at the most critical moment for the most critical rider, when Tadej Pogacar fell right at the end of Stage 11 and dropped his chain. Dils sprung into action, popped the chain back on in seconds, and helped save the day (along with Visma, who declined to attack Pogacar during his moment of misfortune). He said it was far from the hardest problem he’s had to deal with on the job; that one, he said, was a rider’s raincoat becoming tangled in the spokes. “That was like a puzzle,” he said.
In our car, Poret is in the backseat, with Jerome Payen driving. Poret is friendly and wiry, and we communicate in a rough mix of English and French. Payen, who indifferently funnels all my questions to Poret, is the most serious person I have interacted with in France thus far, which I will find myself thankful for in two hours once I realize that driving behind the peloton is closer to piloting a fighter jet than moving in traffic. Poret showed me the charts indicating the technical specifications of each team and which bike on the roof is fitted to which rider. With six to pick from, it’s a rough index for who matters; today, that is the obvious names plus Felix Gall and Enric Mas. Another journalist is deemed more important than me and gets to go in the front car, while we will take the back. Before the race starts, Kasper Asgreen comes over to get his brake lever adjusted and Poret swaps out Michael Storer’s front wheel. He has me send him the photo I took of him working so he can show his kids, and then we’re off.
The first 70 kilometers are boring, yet tense. We are behind the long line of team cars, and the only action is what we can catch from race radio, a cacophonous, bilingual report of what’s going on in the race. In this case, that is “nothing much.” Directeurs sportif pull over to have a leisurely piss, and Tim Wellens and Victor Campenaerts get new front wheels. “Chute de Matthias Skjelmose!” crackles over the radio, and 30 seconds later we see the Trek rider bloodied on the ground. We get the news that he’s abandoned minutes after that. I learn that the road, which was projected onto the official roadbook map as flat, is in fact rolling and unruly terrain that snakes through tight city streets and narrows and widens without warning. Not all categorized roads are equal, or even comparable.
The climbing starts, and we roar through the line of team cars to position ourselves at the back of the group of riders who will matter today. Back of the race means back of the yellow jersey group, and I see what riding at the pace Pogacar dictates feels like. Riders tumble off the back, grimacing in acceptance that their day will be spent surviving, without anything to ride for nor the legs to ride for them. After Kaden Groves gets dropped, we make eye contact for a weirdly long time. Every single child in southern France is pleading for a bidon, and I see the jubilant yelps of the lucky few that get their wish.
We see Remco Evenepoel go backwards. Evenepoel, last year’s third-place finisher, is fresh off a self-professed disastrous day on the bike, and he looks down at his handlebars, grimaces, and shakes his head as we drive by. He’s cooked, and there’s no room to hide on today’s stage. Harry Sweeney comes back to us for some bottles, and offers a very polite thank you. One of Primoz Roglic’s teammates helps stabilize him as he simultaneously rides and pisses, a popular move.
The most visually striking part of the ride is experiencing the crowd as the riders do. Thousands of people whip by in an endless morphing blur, only the most flamboyant of individuals distinguishable against the sea of cheering fans. That tidal surge of humanity swells in the towns, ebbs away on the descents, and flows to its maximum on the climbs, but there are always people. As we are directly behind the best riders in the race, we see those faces the moment after they have watched the superstars of the sport drive by. They are all smiling, some giddily spasming, undoubtedly after having spent hours navigating the tortuous logistics involved in getting oneself onto the side or top of a mountain to find out that, yes, the real thing is a thrill. The tops of the four summits are particularly frenzied, with the hardiest fans forming a two-sided wall that pulses and roars and closes in on every centimeter it can, to the point that it bangs, gleefully, on the side of our car. When I saw the clip going around of an Ineos car hitting a spectator on the Peyresourde, the only thing that surprised me was that this doesn’t happen more often.
The density of the crowds was one of the scary things about the inside of the race; another was the descents. Near the top of the Tourmalet, I saw Julian Alaphilippe grab a fan’s cardboard sign. They had written WOUT on it, but he, fittingly, shortened that to OUT by tearing off the segment that had the W on it and stuffing it into his jersey to keep the wind off his chest on the descent. For decades, riders would grab newspapers for this purpose; the decline of print media has forced them to take drastic measures. Riders bomb down the backsides of mountain passes at speeds in excess of 60 mph, and on Stage 14, the twisty roads were made even more treacherous by the rain and mist. And yet down they bombed all the same. When we would find ourselves overlooking the bunch on a hairpin, I marveled at the focus and bravery it takes to sit in the middle of a long line of riders churning down the mountain, trusting the rider in front of you to pick the right line.
I was the only one in the car allowed to marvel. It was on one of these descents that Poret was pulled into action. Despite having had nothing to do but keep Harry Sweeney hydrated for an hour, he was ready the instant Payen pulled over. The wheel change was perfect.
Payen’s job was equally stressful. Not only did he have to race down a winding mountain road at highway speeds, but he also had to navigate around the rear TV motorbike and zip around riders who got dropped from the pack; he had to keep us right behind the yellow jersey group in case disaster struck. He had to do all this while communicating with the teeming and highly unreasonable fans, which he did by making use of a little horn he could control with his left foot. The cumulative technical and spatial demands on his driving made it something wholly different from what you or I might do behind the wheel; the comparison is roughly that between a wolf and a pug. He would pass a team car on the left and two motos on the right, at the same time, while also talking on race radio, all while reading the road to see if any of the drunk Dutch guys around the bend were going to step in front of the car.
By the time we even approached the Luchon Superbagnères, I was mildly carsick. More than that, though, I was drained from keeping my eyes so focused on a series of moving targets for four hours. Payen and Poret have to stay locked in because the role they play is so important. Ideally, they would be rarely seen and never heard from. Barring that, the best they can hope for is to save the day if called upon. Their workday might be five hours of nothing, or it could instantly become a matter of the Tour de France hanging in the balance. No wonder the only thing I really understood from Payen was the occasional, muttered Putain!
Being in the car with them allowed me to meld the perspective of watching the Tour de France on TV with the experience of seeing it in person. Every rider dropped meant a smaller front group to keep an eye on, and when you are right there, you can see brave French hope Kevin Vauquelin’s grimace as he digs in, or just how differently Primoz Roglic’s body is shaped relative to his teammate Florian Lipowitz’s. I got to watch Felix Gall make the first move, which sent a shudder through the group. The attack was mostly visible in the riders it ejected, with Ben O’Connor and Harold Tejada streaming down the mountain. With four kilometers left, I watched Jonas Vingegaard surge, and 10 seconds later, the radio crackled to announce Attaque du Vingegaard! He and Pogacar gamely dueled one another, with Vingegaard going first. He has to, now that he’s down by four minutes. Pogacar eventually towed him around for a while before beating him by four seconds, which he always does.
Step out of the car was disorienting. I had been in motion for so long that having my feet on dry land felt somehow false. I ran into Dils in the paddock and asked him if he had a busy day. He smiled and said he wasn’t called into action once. It was an easy day, all told, or as easy as riding a motorcycle through wet mountain roads for five hours under intense, invisible pressure to keep the riders of the Tour de France upright can be.