Tour de France Bikes - Garmin/Chipotle Felts

Christian Vandevelde's Felt - Technology packed bikes for the Garmin boys

ProTourNews Technical Editor David Arthur takes a look at Team Garmin/Chipotle Felt Team Bikes.

Team Garmin/Chipotle has landed with a considerable wallop in this years Tour de France. Its riders have been highly visible (thanks in no small part to their kit) with many riders leading the pace and getting in decent breaks. William Frischkorn did just that with a second place on the 2nd stage, and as we go to press Christian Vandevelde is sitting, quite comfortably it should be added, in third place in the General Classification.

The bike Magnus Backstedt used in the spring classics

Christian Vandevelde's Giro Bike

Considerable then is the team’s impact in the race, but it also represents the debut of US bike manufacturer Felt. The company has been building bikes for years, and has a huge following in the triathlon world, but this race will surely lead to an uptake in the road cycling/racing scene around the globe.

The bikes offer the riders some formidable weaponry, with some interesting choice. Released not long before the Tour got rolling is the aerodynamically designed Felt AR. William Frischkorn rode his to great effect in a day-long break on just the second stage of the race, netting a 2nd place in the process. He’ll understandably have been thankful of the watts saved due to the frames aero-efficiency.

Felt claim: “Wind tunnel testing has already shown that the AR is not only faster than all other road bikes in its class, in many cases it is faster than a great number of available TT bikes. In general terms, the new AR offers an approximately 2% saving over a standard road bike when in identical conditions. Depending on actual speed and wind conditions, this equates to a saving of 58-75(+) seconds over the course of a one hour ride.”

While the AR has been in action on the flatter stages, as the race entered the mountains the company’s team issue F1 was pulled out of the team bus. The frame carries Felt’s distinctive profile and is built from proprietary Ultra-Hybrid carbon into a sub 900g frameset.

Each bike in the team fleet is equipped with a full complement of Shimano Dura-Ace 7800 parts, with Oval supplying handlebars, stems and seat posts. Saddles are mostly Fizik Arione’s. Zipp wheels provide the rotational duties, with various rim depths available to the team depending on the stage. For many of the stages the bikes are fitted with CycleOps PowerTap SL 2.4 rear hubs, laced to Zipp rims, which communicate, via ANT+ wireless protocol, to the stem-mounted (and custom painted) Garmin Edge 705 computers.

This allows each rider a staggering amount of data at their disposal and allows easy analysing following each stage. Speed, altitude, distance, heart rate and watts are available at a glance on the Edge’s large colour screen. No other team can boast such technological wizardry. Another benefit is the ability of sharing such data, which we’ve been able to exclusively share recently, with all the numbers from David Millar’s stage 4 time trial.

Also
Magnus's Training Bike
Click to see more pictures
www.saris.com
www.feltracing.com
www.garmin.com