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Video: What's inside the Team Sky mechanics’ truck?

A vast range of spares, the comfiest workplace in pro team wrenching and stems in millimetre increments

Most of us are content to tweak our bike fit to within a few millimetres, but that’s not enough precision for those magnificent men with their marginal gains at Team Sky. As you can see in this video from GCN, the stem drawer in the team Sky mechanics’ truck is a precision fit-fettler’s wet dream, filled with a selection of stems in single millimetre length increments.

That’s not the only unusual feature of the truck uncovered by Simon Richardson here. It has novel expandable sides so even with 27 bikes and a huge number of wheels hung inside, there’s still plenty of room for the mechanics. That means they don’t have to work outside under an Ez-Up, the fate of most pro team spanner-wielders, but can be inside and comfortable in all weathers.

The truck also has an area for the team helpers to store riders’ kit, washing machines for clothing and even an onboard vacuum cleaner stashed in an external compartment.

With all those choices of stem length, we can’t help thinking that Sky riders must be constantly wondering whether they could do with an extra millimetre, or a couple of milimetres less. Has this finally solved the mystery of just what Chris Froome is thinking about when he looks so intently at his stem


Chris Froome discusses his stem with an OPQS team staffer (CC BY-SA 2.0 licence by denismenchov08:Flickr)

John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.

He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.

Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.

John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.

He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.

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RobD | 9 years ago
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Do the stems also come in single degree angle increments? They could end up needing a separate truck just for stems at that rate.

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