How F1 is influencing cycling's pursuit of speed: ‘We're in the middle of an aero war right now'

New York Times

a day ago

This Sunday, the British Grand Prix will take place at Silverstone. Only a few hours earlier, Stage Two of the 2025 Tour de France will begin in Lauwin-Planque, just south of Lille.
On a flat straight, Formula 1 cars can travel well over 200mph. On a flat straight, the peloton moves at around an eighth of that pace. In terms of speed, the two sports can feel worlds apart.
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Though several of motorsport's top drivers — the likes of Carlos Sainz, Oliver Bearman, and Valtteri Bottas — have trained with Tadej Pogacar in Monaco, it feels more like off-season fun than any serious mutual intent.
But Silverstone is a significant location for cycling too — and not just because two of its squads, INEOS Grenadiers and Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe, have tie-ins with F1 teams.
Virtually every team in the peloton has visited the circuit's wind tunnel over recent seasons, chasing aerodynamic performance. With wind resistance responsible for draining 75 per cent of a rider's power on flat stages, and up to 90 per cent in a time trial, the impact can be massive.
'Cycling is about where Formula 1 was 20 years ago,' says Jean-Paul Ballard, a former senior F1 engineer at Toyota and Sauber, and the founder of Swiss Side, specialists in manufacturing aerodynamic cycling wheels.
'But people now understand the gains you can make. We're in the middle of an aero war right now.'
Its influence has permeated the sport — and changed it. Riders have adjusted their positions, helmets and skinsuits have changed shape and material, while teams now rush to convince transfer targets that they have the fastest overall package, just as Red Bull Racing attempt to do the same with Max Verstappen.
'You've got to maintain the trust and belief of those riders,' adds Ballard, who works with several teams across the peloton. 'You've got to show them how much development you're doing — that you're the team for them.'
How do you make a rider go faster? Historically, cycling had three answers. The first was to push more power. The second was to lose weight. The third was to dope. Some of this thinking was more misguided than others. But as a collective, they missed the point.
'People will spend a fortune to shave tiny amounts of weight off their bike — so tiny that if they have an extra sip of tea in the morning, it'll be wiped out,' adds Dr Barney Garrood, a former F1 aerodynamicist at Ferrari, Mercedes, and Brawn, now working in cycling. 'You can't see air,' he adds. 'People are used to the sensation of driving themselves through it. So aerodynamics are quite a hard sell — but they have a huge effect.'
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'It's ultimately speed that wins bike races,' adds Dan Bigham, former hour world record holder, Olympic medallist, and Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe's head of engineering. 'It doesn't matter if you hit the pedals really hard or you have low drag. The end result is practically the same — you go quicker. That's all we want.'
Nobody epitomises this point more than Remco Evenepoel, the fastest time triallist in the world, nicknamed 'The Aero Bullet'. Though he cannot push as many raw watts as some of some rivals, his compactness and suppleness allows him to cut through the air like no other rider. His average time-trial speed is 2kph faster than any cyclist in history.
Until the gradient reaches nine per cent, aerodynamics is a more important factor on speed than weight. That means it is the priority on all but the steepest slopes — over 90 per cent of any Grand Tour. Koen de Kort, Team Support Manager at Lidl-Trek, estimates that gains of up to 25 per cent can be found from a combination of clothing, helmet, and position.
'We once found a 10 per cent power saving in one wind tunnel session,' says Garrood. 'There's no way you could train to put that on. And the great thing about aerodynamics is that it's an instant game. It doesn't take a long time to produce results like nutrition or a training programme — if you find a helmet that's faster, you can go out the next day, and you will be faster.'
Cycling may be 20 years behind F1 — but that historic underdevelopment has left a bumper crop of low-hanging aerodynamic fruit. Several teams are accelerating towards it.
At Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe, for example, Bigham is working closely with Red Bull's advanced technologies department, an extension of the F1 squad, surrounding software. But uniqueness of cycling's aerodynamics means that motor-racing concepts cannot be instantly applied.
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In many ways, despite its lower speeds, cycling can be a tougher sport to understand aerodynamically than F1. Ultimately, the challenge comes because of those lower speeds.
'In F1, you're going at such speed that the car always has what we call a turbulent boundary layer,' explains Ballard. 'And that's much more predictable and controllable. It's classic aerodynamics. In this field, you talk a lot about NACA profiles — aerospace profiles built by NASA that can be anything up from 150mph, to supersonic speeds, to 1000mph.
'But these don't work efficiently at the low speeds that cycling works at. So when we try to apply our theories and experience from F1, we realised you can't just copy and paste. We needed to do a whole load of new processes. It's a completely different field — you can be a Michelin-starred cook who isn't necessarily a great patisserie chef.'
'I have to say it does get pretty tricky with aerodynamics, because even the aerodynamicists often don't seem to know why something happens,' De Kort adds wryly.
But there are reasons for the aerodynamicists to test their brains in this alien field. Ballard, for example, who got into cycling when training as an endurance racing driver, left F1 partly over environmental responsibility. And for many, cycling is more fulfilling as an aerodynamic problem.
'It's hard to have an impact in F1,' says Bigham, who worked at Mercedes as a junior aerodynamicist from 2012 to 2013. 'You're really at the cutting edge, but I was literally working on a wing mirror for six months. And as the sport gets bigger, your work gets smaller — you're looking at a nut or a bolt. You don't feel like you're a big part of the puzzle — but cycling is the other end of the equation, because you have to do so many jobs.'
Others agree. With this transfer of brainpower, innovation is rapidly emerging as teams develop solutions to the aerodynamic differences between the sports.
Israel–Premier Tech sprinter Jake Stewart's prototype bike raised eyebrows when it debuted at the Criterium du Dauphine last month — featuring huge forklegs and a V-shaped stem — but paid off as he beat a stacked field to win Stage Five.
In May, Picnic PostNL's Caspar van Uden won Stage Four with both him and his sprint train wearing bespoke 'sprint helmets', smooth-sided but subtly different to the team's TT helmets.
Arguably, the two most surprising sprint results of 2025 have both relied on aerodynamic innovation.
Criticism over the sprint helmets' appearance? For relegation-threatened Picnic, that does not matter.
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'It's a new thing — the stage was flat, the temperature wasn't too high, so we felt it was a benefit to use them,' Matt Winston, Picnic's race coach, explained the day before the Tour's Grand Depart in Lille. The next week will see several more sprint opportunities.
'It had been in the planning for a while. And so it depends on the weather, the conditions, the technicality of the finish — but potentially we will use them in the Tour.'
Another thing to remember is that cyclists don't exist in a bubble — but are part of a peloton's chaos.
'Obviously, you want to be the fastest, but how do you get away from your competitors and expose their weaknesses?' asks Bigham. 'Aerodynamics play a huge part. You want to get rid of the draft behind you so that riders can't follow you. Sometimes, we want to have man vs man, and get rid of the aero drag that neutralises that.'
Unsurprisingly, riders are becoming wiser. This is the job of De Kort, whose role at Lidl-Trek, after a 19-year professional career, is to act as the connection between the team and equipment providers. There are motorsport links throughout the team — MotoGP rider Aleix Espargaro will race for the squad at next week's Tour of Austria.
'I love the idea of being the first in the peloton to do something,' he says. 'I'm always open and happy to listen.'
Recently, they spent almost two weeks in the wind tunnel to develop a new skinsuit, which they believe was the fastest in the peloton. It was worn to victory in the Giro's second time trial by Daan Hoole. Striking the battle between speed and thermal regulation is a constant battle — if a rider overheats, any marginal gains can be negated by losing up to 40 per cent of their power output.
Another development comes with Garrood's company, Aerosensor, which manufactures tiny chips capable of calculating drag without the need for a wind tunnel. With riders often scattered across Europe, it allows far more fluid development.
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'Wind tunnels are in awkward places,' says Garrood. 'Silverstone is one of a handful in Europe that test bikes. So it becomes very expensive. So we allow riders to find a velodrome or a stretch of road, where they can still test their aerodynamics. It's not only more economical, but it's also in the real world — you aren't just sat in a wind tunnel, you can actually pedal in that position.'
De Kort credits Aerosensor with helping Lidl-Trek win the TTT at the Vuelta Femenina in May. But there are disparities in the team. Some of his athletes, such as former world champion Lizzie Deignan, a member of that Vuelta squad, are content to trust the team to deliver the best equipment, and do not ask questions. Others, such as the team's star climber Mattias Skjelmose, winner of this year's Amstel Gold, are obsessive in making their suggestions.
'He'll send me Instagram pictures of some product that only has 10 likes,' laughs De Kort. 'I have no idea how he manages to find them. But the riders give me a lot of good ideas. They are very much on it nowadays.'
Riders on other teams can need more persuasion. Bigham laughs wistfully at the question of how he balances performance with preference. Though the new guard of cyclists are easy to get on board, the older generation can still be reluctant to experiment.
'It's the biggest problem that every team faces to some degree or other,' he replies. 'We're starting to get to a point where we understand the physics and can develop these nice models, but at the end of the day, the rider has to be happy to go and ride it.
'Dean Golich, our global head of performance at Red Bull, gave me some really good advice. He told me: 'Every problem is a human problem, Dan, and you need to tackle it as such.' He's not wrong. So you have to convince a rider who doesn't have your background, your experience, your knowledge, that this is the right thing to do, even if it does not match the sensations they may have associated with a certain outcome.
'And once we approached it from an education perspective, showing riders and coaches what we're doing it and why — to have them understand the physics, so it's not just a black box with a nerd behind a computer telling them to use this chainring, this tire, this pressure — we started making progress.'
Listening to its proponents, cycling's aerodynamic revolution feels inevitable, an insistent march towards ever higher speeds. Some parts of the sport, however, are concerned by these developments.
Christian Prudhomme, general director of the Tour de France, suggested that the peloton was already too fast last year, blaming speed for the scary 12-rider crash involving Jonas Vingegaard, Evenepoel, and Primoz Roglic at the 2024 Itzulia Basque Country.
His comments were echoed to The Athletic by Tour de France course designer Thierry Gouvenou.
'The speed of riders has increased a lot in recent years, precisely because of the equipment,' he said. 'We are reaching a very delicate moment, we are at the height of our risk. I think it's time to reverse the equipment, we have to stop the evolution of material because otherwise we will not be able to use the roads that people use every day.
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'It's up to cycling to adapt to the roads, because the roads are not going to adapt to bike racing. I am part of the SafeR group. I am busy finding new rules, but there is a chance that we will have to go to motorbike or car tracks. If that happens, our sport will be dead. So it's up to us to adapt.'
But others feel that Gouvenou's comments miss the crux of the issue.
'Change needs to come from the federations,' says De Kort. 'It's hard if we as a team say: 'We won't work in the wind tunnel any more'. I think then the only thing that will happen is that we won't win races. That won't improve safety.'
Bigham, for his part, evokes some of Gouvenou's language in taking a diametrically opposed view.
'Cycling is scarily close to its Ayrton Senna moment, and I hope it doesn't have it,' he adds. 'We are one crash away from a significant star of the sport having a life-changing injury, or worse, and then change will be forced upon us.
'It's easy to point the finger at speed, but speed is not the issue. It's predominantly course design, equipment design, and rapid and relevant safety response. At the moment, there are subjective, knee-jerk responses which, if anything, could make us less safe. And that's the scary thing, there's a lot to be done, but we're messing around on the fringes rather than tackling a big core problem.
'If we look at the changes implemented after Senna's crash (there was not another fatal accident from his death in 1994 until Jules Bianchi's crash at the 2014 Japanese Grand Prix), we need to learn from motorsport, just as we're doing on the engineering side.'
(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; David Davies/PA Images via Getty Images)