Spotted: New and Unreleased Tour de France Team Time Trial Tech

Stage 1 of the 2026 Tour de France is done and dusted. A team time trial that has been eagerly anticipated and prototyped at the Dauphiné and Paris-Nice this year. But with the main event rolling into the city of Barcelona, it, like every year, didn’t just bring the greatest riders together; it also brought the greatest bike tech — or at least that’s what the sponsors want us to believe.

And with the race this year kicking off in a slightly unusual style, with a team time trial, it was always going to turn into a tech arms race. That’s exactly what we got on the starting ramp of the 19km pan-flat course with a heck of a kicker to round the parcours out.

So, Stage 1’s Tour mission was to run around the pits and dig out the most interesting tech. But I decided to mix it up, with so many “old” faces, or shall I put it another way, ex-pros working for teams, I thought I’d ask them about how they felt time trial tech has evolved in the few years since they all retired.

This year’s first time trial has, if anything, shown us that huge chainrings are now very much the norm. Only two years ago it was an anomaly to see the likes of Tarling and Ganna churning over 58, 60 or 62 tooth chainrings; back then those two were lone gunmen in the TT tech world.

Today things are very different; 58 now looks small, with many using 64-tooth chainrings and, in some cases, 68 for the likes of Remco. Huge dinner plates are the new norm, and, of course, to turn them over, you need shorter cranks. Again, it was only about three years ago that a select few riders started trying shorter cranks, but the trend has now firmly cemented itself in the pro peloton. 165mm is the new 172mm, with even Shimano quietly now offering a 160mm crankset; it would seem that the trend has caught on enough for the largest player in the components market, and one who is usually very slow to adopt new trends, to have quickly(ish) put 160mm cranks into production, or at least for the professionals.

Other trends we have seen is the adoption of the wide-bodied helmets, and there were a few new ones on show at the race. Van Rysel has the Decathlon CMA CGM team in a new time-trial lid that clearly takes on all the latest ideas for what a TT lid should offer, as did Cofidis with a new Uvex and EF with a new POC, a company that can claim to be a pioneer in wide-body-shaped helmets.

Please delve into the video as there is a heap of great tech crammed into 14 minutes from an afternoon of dashing around a hot, hot paddock. That’s right, the Tour is underway!

Cheers, Dave