2026 Tour of Flanders tech gallery

Alex Hunt, Cor Vos

The Tour of Flanders is the second Monument of the year and acts as the prelude to the final cobbled Classic of the season, Paris-Roubaix. The biggest tech stories are typically reserved for next weekend, and yet, marching around the team buses in a windswept Antwerp, there were enough quirks and quiet experiments to make it worth slowing down and taking a closer look.

From Visma-Lease a Bike’s attempts to improve tyre retention to Remco Evenepoel’s eye-catching sidewalls, Flanders offered an early look at the calculated balance between performance, durability, and risk management shaping this year’s Classics.

The Ineos Grenadiers were running their standard road-race configuration, albeit with 30 mm tyres mounted on wheels from the new sponsor Scope rather than the standard 28 mm.Most teams fit the race transponder to the inside or outside of the fork leg, shrouding it in either short sections of inner tube or heat shrink. However, here on British national champ Sam Watson's bike, you can see the transponder mounted at the base of the fork leg, sitting directly behind it, courtesy of a small 3D-printed holding block.

No custom 'TP' logo on Pogačar's chainrings at Flanders this year (left). Instead, his Y1Rs and spare bikes all had standard Carbon-Ti chainrings, and although the sizes were blacked out, he was using a 55/40 combination. On the right: The custom chainrings he used at Milan-San Remo last year.

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