This year’s Tour de France is the 112th running of the event, covering more than 2000 miles over the month of July. Almost all of the route this year is in France, with twenty-three teams competing for wins both of stages and outright overall. If you’ve no idea how the Tour actually works, or what the green, yellow, and red jerseys signify, you can check out Netflix’s Unchained series, which basically does what Drive to Survive did for F1.
At the head of the pack for 2025 is not a bike and rider, but a car, a red Škoda with a few custom features. Škoda has long been a leading sponsor of the Tour, and race directors have been riding up front of the lead peloton in Škodas for decades. One of the tricks done to these cars is to have the sunroof work in reverse, retracting towards the front of the car, so that the director can stand up if needed for a better view.
Further back, amidst the squadrons of motorcycle-riding reporters and film crews, are the support vehicles. Usually carrying several bikes in roof-mounted racks, these cars enable rolling pit stops for the riders, and are ready to pass off fuel, water, electrolytes, replacement inner tubes, or even a full bicycle should a really bad crash occur. Each team has a full motorcoach with physical therapists and coaches and whatnot at the end of the stage, but when on the move, the support vehicles of the Tour de France are invaluable. Once upon a time, however, they were very much not allowed.
Before we get into that, a look at the front-runners of this year’s event: Tadej Pogačar, the Slovenian rider who won last year’s overall Tour de France title, has a fierce rivalry with Denmark’s Jonas Vingegaard, who claimed the 2022 and 2023 titles. These guys are all stick-thin endurance athletes, but they are also tough as hell—Vingegaard suffered a punctured lung in a horrific crash last year and still rallied to finish second behind Pogačar overall.
But there is still one undisputed legend of road cycling, the Belgian Édouard Louis Joseph Merckx. Better known as Eddy, Merckx was ruthlessly dominant during his era, to the point that he earned from a teammate the nickname Le Cannibale. When he rode, practically no one else could win, and over his nearly two-decade career, he notched up a staggering five hundred and twenty-five victories.
Cycling has five classic one-day road races, and Merckx remains the only rider to have won all of them at least twice. His career is a litany of crashes and comebacks, riding through pain and illness, and racking up five Tours de France along the way. In fact, his second-place finish in the 1975 Tour de France was the first time in six starts that he didn’t win outright, and that was possibly due to being attacked by a spectator while on the route.
In the early days of the Tour, such behavior was not unheard of, and there are even stories of onlookers pelting riders with produce and trying to puncture tires by throwing nails on the path. Everyone had a favorite rider, and throwing off the competition was just part of the game.
The organizers, particularly founder Henri Desgrange, were pretty strict about the rules. No rider was allowed any sort of outside help, and had to carry all their own equipment and replacements. Rather famously, this resulted in a time penalty for a rider who stopped at a forge to repair a broken fork. The rider did the hammering himself, but the stewards ruled that by asking for help to pump the bellows, he’d broken the guidelines and was awarded a three-minute penalty.
Cars did accompany the Tour during this period, but they were largely there for journalistic coverage or promotion. One of the most bizarre, or perhaps most deeply French, sights at the Tour from 1952 to 1963 was a Citroën carrying accordionist Yvette Horner on its roof, following the cyclists all the way. Horner worked hard, not just playing the whole way but also handing out the garlands to the stage winner, and then performing late into the night for various dances held by her sponsors.
Into the 1970s, the increasing professionalism of road-race cycling meant that team support vehicles became a requirement. The days of lashing innertubes around your body were over. If a team wanted to stand a chance of winning, it needed a proper support staff of mechanics and spares. Some of the romance might have arguably faded—there would be no more riders pilfering bottles of champagne from bars along the way—but four-wheeled support meant that riders like Merckx could pick up the pace.
For 1975, that meant Volvos. Merckx’s longtime cycling sponsor was Team Molteni, established by a family firm that specialized in salami (peak Europe achieved). The team’s signature livery was a bright and sunny orange, and is still highly recognized today among cycling enthusiasts. A reproduction of the original wool jersey as worn by Merckx was introduced in 2018 in limited quantities and sold out instantly.
You know what else looks good in salami-wrapper orange? A stolid, square-bodied Volvo 244. The car you see here, shot by drifting and classic car photographer Matt Thompson, is actually a 1977 example, but as the Volvo 240 didn’t change much over the years, it’s a solid match as a tribute car. Just ignore the Arizona cacti in the background and pretend they’re Mediterranean olive trees instead.
In the cycling world, this vintage Volvo is as much an icon as an Apple-livery turbocharged Porsche or a BRE Datsun 510 or a Gulf Blue Ford GT40. Yes, it’s far slower than all of those, even with a four-speed manual, but it’s faithful and honest. Throw in a vintage bike on the roof, and you’ve got the look of a Tour de France support vehicle that went the distance, backing up Le Cannibale’s record-setting riding.
Regardless of whether you’re a hardcore Tour de France fan or just an enthusiast for old Swedish steel, the existence of dozens of tributes to the Team Molteni support vehicles should make your heart swell. Maybe it’s time to dig the ol’ ten speed out of the garage and go for a ride.
