Tag: US Racing

Bikes of the Tour de France, 2008: Bicycles, we love them! With the Tour well underway, we thought it would be interesting to take a first look at some of the bikes being used by the teams making the news. When we join the race next week we will of course be bringing you more bike-geek articles!

At French WorldTour squad Groupama FDJ, Lewis Askey has come close to a French UCI 1.1 semi-classic win and is always in the thick of the televised action. Unfortunately, his progress has been pulled up short by a crash at Paris-Roubaix – most likely caused by the dreaded disc rotor. We caught up with him as he recuperated back in England.

The Dotty Jumper. Or the polka dot (climbers) jersey, or the king of the mountains. This is the jersey that is currently the least predictable of those up for grabs in the Tour, and also currently the least closely followed (this is perhaps untrue in non-Anglophone countries, but comparing the amount of coverage that Cav gets in his green jersey battles, as opposed to Anthony Charteau in his dotty battles, I don't think so).

SRAM brought out the new Force and Rival groupsets a while back [read our Review of the Force groupset here], and the Saunier Duval ProTour team used it on their Scott bikes to great effect last season. Now SRAM have released the SRAM Red group set and as well as Saunier Duval, the new Astana team will be using the Red group on their Trek Madone frames for the 2008 season as well. We managed to get a sneak preview and a short ride on an Astana team bike recently when they were in Spain for their first training camp.

Bonjour 08.30 we're just getting ready to roll. This is our second F1 hotel of the trip, Grenoble two nights ago and here, last night, basic but clean and the beds work fine - 33 euros for the two of us, so musn't grumble. It's another beautiful day in France, more that can be said for St. Etienne, which seems to be re-inventing itself as a 'Techno Town.' The old part of town is fine though, we had an excellent pizza in a little restaurant last night. Motorbikes and Emma Davies Jones!

He's raced in Belgium and spent time in The Basque Nation but the pro contract for 2016 has come closer to home with Raleigh. Aberdonian Craig Wallace joins Evan Oliphant at the 'Heron squad' for the next phase of his career - here's what he had to say to VeloVeritas, recently.