Minimum

Today we finished on Macon, GA and we are at the same hotel as last year. That makes it easy as I already know where water and power are. So getting set up is almost like cake. And since we finished relatively early Juan and I finished bikes in a reasonable hour.
At our Hotel was a tour group from the Discover Adventures company. The name is oh so close but not related to our team in any way. This is the tour company that I did a trip with a few weeks or so ago. It was called the pro series and Frankie Andreu was the key speaker who also talked a bit about training and we even did some skills during that trip. The trip included riding 3 gap one day and also Hog Pen finishing with Brastown Bald two days later at the end of the trip. I even got to bring my bike on that trip. Brastown Bald is one steep pitch. Only 5k long but it rips your legs in half. I only had a 39/25 and it felt like I was would pedal with my left foot, pause a moment, pedal with my right foot, pause a moment and pedal with my left foot. You get the picture. STEEP!!!
Tom from Discover Adventures asked if I could speak to his group and give them a brief tour of our team truck. You could see the jaws drop when I opened the truck to show them our equipment. The questions were flying like machine gun speed. They all had a host of questions while looking at what we have to use at our disposal.
Our new truck is ultra cool and finally has enough room to Cary our needs. Be it Soigneur related or mechanic related. Besides a host of parts, tires, trainers, cables, etc., the most visually impacting sight is the wheels. The truck holds 12 bikes hanging on the side wall. but rarely is it full of bikes as our riders fly here with bikes, and thus I rarely have bikes hanging. But since we had a TT here the truck was really full. We had the 16 bikes from riders (race bike and TT bike ea.) and the 5 spare bikes for a total of 21 bikes. So many that we just keep the race bikes complete sitting in the floor so we can pull them out for the next days stage.
But like I said, hands down the wheels are the most visually impacting sight as we can carry 62 pairs of wheels. To most you would say that’s a lot. To me I wish that I could cary more. If you think that they race a certain day on one type of wheel. With a team of 8 riders that’s 8 pairs of wheels to race on and at least 6 pair for spares that same day (of the same type of wheel). That’s 14 pairs of only ONE type of wheel.
In total we bring 3 types of primary race wheels for a total of 42 pair of racing wheels, 11 pairs of clincher wheels and 8 pair of TT wheels and a few pair of a newer wheel that is sort of still in the works. To me I could use a few more pairs of wheels. But we can finally do pretty well with this amount now. So, I’m happy. But to the Discover Adventures group it was like a bike shop. Totally complete (it is pretty much). But to me it was the minimum.

CClinton

Owner of Promechanics.com and long time professional race mechanic.