The tour begins with a performance
New regime forces Red Bull to make difficult decisions
Listen to the article (03:55 min)
July 4, 2026 | 05:57
The Tour de France begins with tactical difficulties, with even the top stars facing serious setbacks in the first team time trial. So Lipowitz’s team worked for several months.
Child prodigy Paul Seixas and his Decathlon team tested top-speed flight on the Formula 1 Circuit of Circuit de Catalunya on Thursday. Instead, Florian Lipowitz and his strong Red Bull team rely on the mastery of tactical guru Dan Bigham. Team time trial at the start of the 113th Tour de France in Barcelona on Saturday. (17:05/ARD and Eurosport) The race for the first yellow jersey generated a lot of activity among the 23 racing teams. Strategic opportunities are as many sources of error as possible.
“I think a time trial like this is cool and much more exciting at the start than a classic flat stage,” says Ralf Denk, Team Principal of Red Bull-Bora-hansgrohe: “I think it will be a spectacle. But for us there is a lot more work to do to prepare it.” If he had a choice, he would have decided differently: “I would prefer the traditional regime. This is called a team time trial, not an individual time trial with a long lead. But that’s how it is, you have to come to terms with it.”
Teams facing a tactical dilemma
For the first time on the Tour, a new mode is used that turns the time trial into a mixture of individual and team competition: where previously the time of the fourth or fifth rider was decisive for the team time (which was then included in the overall individual ranking for all riders who crossed the finish line as a closed group), the fastest rider’s time now counts towards the team daily ranking. However, each rider’s individual time will be taken into account when compiling the overall ranking.
What this means for the teams is: will I be aiming for the day’s victory (as well as the yellow award) with the strongest time trialist and possibly risk falling behind the classification rider? Or do I blame the captain for everything? Red Bull, for example, has the world’s best time trialist in its ranks, Belgian Olympic champion Remco Evenepoel, who could beat overall podium candidate Lipowitz, but could also leave him behind. What makes planning difficult is that the first 15 kilometers of the 19.6 kilometers are classic flat time trial terrain, but after that the road goes uphill.
The best teams fall apart
At the Tour of Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes in mid-June, which used the same team time trial mode, even the best teams fell apart. Only three of the 22 teams, including Red Bull, had their two fastest drivers arrive at the same time. Sometimes the first driver was a minute and a half ahead of the second. In the Visma team, an expert like Wout Van Aert lost contact early – and ended up losing five minutes at 28 kilometers.
Unlike other teams, Denk no longer sent his “train” to the Formula 1 race track in Barcelona: “We did our homework.” In particular, Brit Bigham, as “Head of Engineering”, has been involved with the topic since the presentation of the route in October 2025, and in January he carried out trials with a touring team in Mallorca.
“The few days leading up to it and the day itself will be very, very strictly regulated, very well organized and very well coordinated,” Bigham said on Cyclingmagazine.de: “Which rider do you put in which position? Is the physically strongest rider riding behind Evenpoel, or someone who is mentally strong? As much as he lets Bigham mess around, Denk is equally calm: “The Tour or the podium won’t be decided on the first stage. We’re talking seconds. And in the last week of the tour we’ll talk about minutes.”
Sources used: ntv.de, tno/sid.