That’s how difficult it is to drive with a support car in a cycling race

It is early Sunday morning, Easter 2022. The first rays of the sun caress the roofs of Compiègne in northern France. The city is still very quiet, but in the parking lot behind hotel T’Aim at the foot of the Pont Neuf there is already plenty of activity, because of the start of a wheel classic. Even though it’s called Paris-Roubaix, the French capital hasn’t done this race for a long time. Compiègne is now the starting point and two major cycling teams, Team DSM and UAE Emirates, have chosen this hotel as their headquarters for this edition.

As we approach the start, my thoughts drift back to the previous day, when I was in a Team DSM service car at the Paris-Roubaix Femmes, the women’s edition. Then you do not ride in the caravan, but you always cross the inside to a point agreed in advance with the coach over the radio to await the passage of the riders, so that you can supply them from the side with fresh water bottles and, if necessary , spare wheels. That’s quite a challenge, because you can’t leave the previous stop until the last rider of your team has passed and then you have to make sure you are back at the next point in plenty of time to park the car, water bottles and wheels gather and take position along the side before the first participants race past. This course is also so grueling for the material that any help, even from a left-handed piece taper, will come in handy. It is my honor to take care of the wheels and that means that I have to stand on the side with a front and rear wheel in the air, where our riders can see me clearly. Coach Wilbert Broekhuizen, my supervisor this weekend, reassures me: if one of them needs a new wheel, I just have to indicate it and maybe hold the bike for her while she changes the wheel herself. That doesn’t seem like high math to me, so at the first stop I’m swinging my wheels like a happy kid at a carnival parade.

The courage in the shoes

I soon lose heart: my fellow wheel swingers from other teams do indeed roll up their sleeves when making changes. So I can assume that the same will be expected of me when one of our riders stops at my place. But no one has asked me if I’ve ever changed a road bike wheel, especially not in a situation where every second counts. Coincidentally, I’m an amateur cyclist (well, coincidentally, nowadays almost every guy between 20 and 90 tries to keep the Grim Reaper at bay with an overpriced bike in his butt), so I often change a road bike wheel. Still, my nerves break out when Lorena Wiebes stops right in front of me. “Wheel, wheel, wheel!” she greets me agitated. I see two fine tires on her bike, so I greet back with “Front or rear?” “Rear!” she barks, as she begins to turn the quick-release clutch on her front wheel. “Tool!” she yells, and I pull my Allen key from my back pocket. As she slides the fresh wheel into the fork, I guide the brake disc into the caliper. Lorena jumps back on her bike and disappears into the raging crowd.

big pressure

“Also nice barking?”, asks a fellow wheel smurf from Jumbo Visma with a laugh. “Ah, I’m used to worse at home,” I say, trying to be the funniest home. Moreover, I understand that Lorena was under great pressure, so a nice chat was not possible for a while. “Just wait, the worst is yet to come,” she continues, holding a quick-release front axle in front of me. My heart skips a beat. “Is it from…?” Jumbo Visma nods sardonically. In retrospect, she must have fooled me. Without that axle, Lorena would have been within ten yards of the berm, but she made it to the finish line gloriously.

spare bikes

We have now arrived at the Château de Compiègne, where the official presentation of the teams will take place on the Place du Général de Gaulle. The earlier Easter morning calm has disappeared like snow in the sun and all of Compiègne has gone out to marvel at the men who voluntarily throw themselves into the Hell of the North. Our two support cars, the tour bus and the service truck are in the shade of the old trees, where the mechanics carry out the final checks on the bicycles and the riders sign autographs to exuberant cycling fans behind the crush barriers. I’m in one of the two support cars that I’m sharing today with Wilbert next to me at the wheel and mechanic Maarten behind me. Our job today is very different from yesterday. Six spare bicycles are set up on the roof of the car, one for each rider in our team. The second support car has one spare bicycle per rider. That is very precise, because every bicycle is precisely adjusted to the man who has to ride it. The bikes of the most important (read: most promising) riders are on the corners, so that the loss of time during a change will be the smallest for them. Half of the rear seats are full of spare wheels and the trunk of the V60 Cross Country is filled with other materials and a huge cool box full of water bottles and gels, concentrate in tubes.

Special equipment

The V60 is known for its tidy dashboard, but there is little of that left with these race cars: it is largely hidden behind special equipment. Maarten goes through the arsenal with me, so that I will soon know what is coming our way and I may even be able to think along a bit. The Volvo infotainment screen disappears behind two tablets. VeloViewer, a kind of navigation adapted to professional cycling, runs on the left. It provides live information about the route, the stages, special obstacles or other problems, remaining distances, gradients, quality (or better: lack thereof) of the road surface and other data with which the coaches feed the riders via radio. On the tablet next to it, we watch live images from Eurosport, of which the helicopter images are certainly valuable because of the overview of the caravan. Three radios are mounted under the dashboard. The race radio provides a continuous stream of information from the race management, we use the car to car radio to talk to the other escort cars and the rider radio is in contact with the headsets our riders wear. The whole causes a cacophony of crackling voices in French, English and Dutch that scream for attention on a bed of static noise. It really does require supreme concentration to filter out the essentials from that avalanche of information.

Knetterhard

All the more respect I get for Wilbert’s steering skills. While I struggle to keep an eye on all the radio channels, he manages to keep the packed Volvo on the road, occasionally yanking the roadbook out of my hands to flip through it. And that sounds much simpler than it is, because it goes bonkers and often literally with only centimeters away from the various support cars, the riders and the audience, who are bent over the road with real contempt, cheering and waving. Only now do I realize how something as bizarre as the ‘Allez Opi Omi’ incident at last year’s Tour de France could go so horribly wrong. Again and again my eyes dart to the speedometer and I realize that this pace is determined by people on the bike.

Assistance systems help

We notice that the assistance systems of modern cars are a welcome development in this sport when something happens somewhere in the crowd in front of us (which later turns out to be a crash), so that everyone suddenly comes to a standstill. Despite his excellent reflexes and alertness, Wilbert has to admit that without the Volvo’s automatic braking we probably would have had a problem. The Peugeot 508 of Team Sport Vlaanderen-Baloise behind us still knows how to anticipate this in time (automatically or not), but the Skoda behind it does not. A dull thud and creaking testify to this. The Skoda is too badly damaged to continue. The Peugeot continues its course with a drooping rear bumper and shattered rear light, only to make the mistake itself an hour later by driving the front short on another support vehicle. It looks like a madhouse of support cars, which are chasing the riders in a kind of chaotic rush. In reality, it is an art that is held together by unwritten laws and gentlemen’s agreements. Just sit on the bumper, honk a few times and your competitor pushes itself with real contempt for death between two others to let you through. It becomes completely bizarre when a motorcycle cop riding along with the course does not move aside quickly enough for us, according to Wilbert’s wishes. This maneuver would normally put you on a driving ban for at least a year, but the motard quickly moves to the side and makes an apologetic gesture.

This is the second season that Team DSM is driving the Volvo V60 Cross Country. He proves himself especially here on the cobblestones of Northern France, I hear in the conversations with the team members. “No other car goes over that smoothly,” a mechanic assures me. “In addition, you have a lot of space for all materials.” Team DSM has thirty Volvos in service, five of which will participate in this race. They are technically identical to the standard B5 mild-hybrid with 250 hp, eight-speed automatic transmission and four-wheel drive. Wilbert praises the robustness and solid feel that his car offers. “But the complete decoration is also nice. Especially the seat ventilation is wonderful. It’s not that hot yet, but at many cycling races in the summer you’re sweating here.”

No unnecessary luxury

And although he does not mention it himself, the automatic transmission does not seem a superfluous luxury to me in this branch of sport. You should not think that Wilbert would also have to switch himself during multitasking. Still, it all looks more dangerous than it is, he assures me. Although: you don’t just get behind the wheel of a support car in a cycling race. Everyone must first follow a team leader course at the UCI (Union Cycliste Internationale, the international cycling federation) in Switzerland. “There you not only learn the regulations, but also drive safely in sequence and all the other theory.” What probably also helps is that Wilbert himself has been on the bike for years and therefore has a flawless sense of what lives in such a caravan.

Sounds

For me as an amateur, Paris-Roubaix is ​​above all a confrontational lesson in humility. Where I consider myself a lot if I manage to write down fifty kilometers with an average of 30 km/h on the bicycle paths through the dunes, these tough guys drive no less than 258 kilometers with an average of 50 km/h under the most terrible conditions. The Volvo V60 Cross Country also takes a hit on the absurdly bad road surface for which this race is notorious. At one point, the thumping along the way is so bad that my sports watch thinks I’m running and starts counting my steps. The car itself, however, does not make a sound. Well, barely. When we drive back to the Netherlands on the E17 that evening through Belgium, I think I hear some noises somewhere in the front right that were not there on the way there. They forgive him.

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