With the 2025 Tour de France looming large on the horizon, the key contenders are honing their form, kit and strategies at the Critérium du Dauphiné this week.
Comprising eight stages in the Dauphiné region of southeastern France, the race functions as a crucial dress rehearsal ahead of road cycling’s most prestigious race, in July.
With this in mind, the stars of the sport often use it as a proving ground to test new equipment.
This year, we’ve spotted new aero road bikes from the likes of Factor and Cervélo, new tubeless tyres and wheels from Specialized, new time trial and aero road helmets and more.
So, without any further ado, let’s take a look at some of the most eye-catching bits of new pro bike tech breaking cover at the 2025 Critérium du Dauphiné.
Factor’s radical new aero bike
The talk of the week has undoubtedly been Factor’s new aero road bike, which is being ridden by Israel–Premier Tech’s Jake Stewart.
The British rider won the fifth stage aboard the new bike, which appears to be heavily inspired by Factor’s Hanzo time trial bike.
Like the Hanzo, Factor’s new aero road bike features a razor-thin head tube, with the fork extending out in front of the head tube to create a deeper effective aerofoil, presumably reducing drag.
On top, the new bike features gull-wing-style handlebar reminiscent of the Specialized S-Works Venge ViAS.
As on the Hanzo, the fork has a wide stance design with tons of room between the wheel and fork legs.
While WorldTour riders are increasingly using large tyres at many races, it's safe to assume the gapingly wide fork has less to do with adding clearance to the frame, and is more about improving its aerodynamic performance.
The legs aren’t as wide as on British Cycling’s Hope HB.T Paris track bike, so we suspect the design isn’t intended to impact the airflow over the rider’s legs.
Instead, we wonder if moving the fork legs away from the front wheel could put the blades in cleaner airflow, and reduce turbulence caused by the fork legs interacting with airflow coming off the wheel.
The rear of the new Factor aero bike looks more conventionally shaped, with a selection of deep aerofoil tube shapes, dropped seat stays and an aero seatpost.
Whatever the reason for the wide fork, let’s hope it doesn’t fall foul of the UCI’s recently announced limit on fork widths, which are set to come into effect in 2026 (alongside changes to minimum handlebar width and maximum rim depth).
Read more on the UCI’s new rules
- BikeRadar readers react to the UCI’s 'moronic' and 'discriminatory' handlebar rules
- UCI rejects One Cycling with damning description of proposed racing reforms
- “It’s impossible” – how the UCI’s new controversial handlebar rules will affect pro riders and teams
Visma | Lease a Bike all in on Cervélo’s new S5
Speaking of new aero bikes, Team Visma | Lease a Bike riders have been using the recently leaked update to the Cervélo S5 throughout this year’s race (except during the time trial, of course).
With the benefit of higher resolution images from the race photographers, we can now get a clearer picture of what has – or, more accurately, hasn’t – changed versus the current S5.
New one-piece handlebar aside, the new bike looks almost identical to the existing S5 from a side profile.
We can see the fork blades are a little deeper and remain so towards the drop-outs, while the head tube appears to extend a bit more deeply back from the fork.
The ‘compensation triangle’ (that’s UCI-speak for the triangular shapes/structures created by filling-in the inside of joints between frame tubes in the frame) between the top tube and seat tube also looks to have grown slightly.
Given confirmation of relatively minimal aerodynamic changes for the next generation Cervélo S5, our money’s on the big gains coming in the form of reduced weight.
When we weighed Vingegaard’s S5 at the Grand Depart of the 2023 Tour de France, it weighed just under 7.2kg. That’s pretty good for a full-fat aero road bike, but was achieved with shallow tubular rims and tyres – things that feel decidedly outdated in 2025.
With deeper rims and tubeless tyres, that figure would be likely to rise.
Anything that can help the S5 edge closer to the UCI’s infamous 6.8kg minimum bike weight limit would presumably be welcomed with open arms by Vingegaard and his teammates.
Specialized’s Turbo Cotton finally goes tubeless, plus new aero wheels
Although most of the WorldTour has embraced tubeless tyres in recent years, Specialized-sponsored teams have remained a notable holdout.
That looks set to change at long last, though, as Remco Evenepoel, his Soudal Quick-Step teammates and riders at Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe, are all using what appears to be a tubeless version of Specialized’s long-standing Turbo Cotton tyre.
Like the Turbo Cotton, this tyre appears to be constructed with tan-coloured cotton sidewalls, with a thin, black rubber tread on top.
The tread retains the turbo cotton’s minimalist file tread pattern on the shoulders, which Specialized has previously claimed helps to improve cornering grip on “uneven, imperfect roads”.
Of course, as with any road racing tyre, rolling resistance (or a lack of it) will be key.
The Turbo Cotton was regarded as being one of the fastest clinchers available for many years, but if Specialized-sponsored teams have finally been convinced to switch to tubeless, then this model could be even more efficient.
Some riders are using these tyres on a set of unreleased Roval Rapide CLX III carbon wheels.
The wheelset doesn’t look too dissimilar from the current model (the Rapide CLX II wheelset) at a glance, but there’s a new front hubm and it appears it may use carbon spokes – an on-trend feature for many high-end road bike wheelsets at the moment.
Beyond that, details are scant for now, but you know the drill – we’ve no doubt they’ll be lighter, stiffer and more aerodynamic, and probably even more expensive, given current trends.
Remco’s new visor
On the subject of Remco Evenepoel, the world time trial champion was sporting a rather unusual visor on his Specialized S-Works TT5 time trial helmet.
While the stock visor for that helmet extends down to cover more of the rider’s face, Evenepoel’s new visor featured a large U-shaped cut-out that exposed his nose to the wind.
Despite this being the visor’s first WorldTour appearance (as far we’re aware), eagle-eyed social media sleuth, @CyclingSpy, noted the visor is already available on Specialized’s website for the princely sum of $449.99.
The product listing notes the visor was “developed in partnership with our pro riders for optimised fit and aero performance”, which is fairly vague.
From watching Evenepoel blitz the 17.4km time trial on stage 4, however, we suspect the visor is shaped to allow him to get his head slightly closer to his hands than he’d otherwise be able to.
It might also help with cooling too, which is always helpful for hot race days in July.
Considering the entire S-Works TT5 helmet, plus original visor, costs ‘just’ £300, $449.99 for a replacement visor seems somewhat ridiculous at face value, though…
So perhaps it’s just on sale to satisfy the UCI’s commercial availability rules (which dictate that everything used in UCI events must be on sale to the general public, after a limited period allowed for testing prototypes).
Big TT lids on show
Elsewhere in the time trial, plenty of riders were sporting oversized time trial helmets – something which has become a clear trend since the 2022 Tour de France.
Eschewing his sponsor-correct Abus GameChanger TT 1.1, Mathieu van der Poel opted for a Rudy Project Wingdream helmet, with team logos applied.
Tudor Pro Cycling Team riders were kitted out with a new time trial helmet from sponsor Oakley. According to the team, it’s called the VELO TT – an appropriate name, I’m sure we can all agree.
Kurt Bergin-Taylor, the team’s head of innovation, said computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modelling was used to test “hundreds of different prototypes” before arriving at a final design. To our eye, it bears a certain resemblance to the Specialized S-Works TT5, although the Oakley helmet has a longer, more heavily tapered tail.
Jonas Vingegaard, meanwhile, was wearing the most outlandish helmet of all, with a custom red and white Giro Aerohead II celebrating team and personal sponsor, Bygma.
The enormous helmet caused much consternation when it was revealed last year, but has since become a firm fixture in the wonderfully absurd tapestry of pro road cycling.
Bucking this trend, XDS Astana have a much smaller TT lid courtesy of team title sponsor XDS.
According to former UCI Hour Record-holder, Alex Dowsett – a performance engineer with the team – the helmet has been designed to suit a wide variety of riders and positions, rather than for one specific rider or team leader.
Jonathan Milan is using old SRAM Red shifters
While we typically assume pro cyclists only want to use the latest and greatest kit available, that’s not always the case.
At this Dauphine, we spotted the rangy Italian sprinter, Jonathan Milan, using previous-generation SRAM Red eTap AXS shifters on his bike.
It’s a curious situation given SRAM's latest Red AXS shifters were widely praised for their revised ergonomics and smaller form factor.
However, at 1.93m tall, Milan’s a big rider and probably has fairly sizable hands. Our guess is that he simply prefers the older shifters precisely because they’re bigger and less svelte than the new ones.
