Visma-Lease a Bike’s manager Richard Plugge has said that other WorldTour teams will copy their controversial control room at next year’s Tour de France.
The Dutch team announced at the start of the 2024 Tour that they would have a high-tech van among their vehicle fleet at the race, a place where sports directors could analyse real-time data such as additional TV footage from the race and then feedback to the DSs in the cars behind the peloton.
In announcing its introduction just before the Tour got underway, Visma said that the converted van would enable the team “to make the best tactical decisions, quickly and accurately.”
Within days, however, the sport’s governing body, the UCI, were investigating the mobile command centre, stressing the importance of “primacy of man over machine”, before refusing the van an accreditation sticker for the race – despite Visma not requesting one.
Instead, the van is parked close but away from the race, where the personnel inside can compute a vast array of data, before relaying it to their colleagues at the race.
One team told Cycling Weekly that the van is “little more than a publicity and marketing stunt”, but Plugge believes that others will seek to emulate the idea.
“It’s not up to me to say if we’re still the best team [after winning all three Grand Tours in 2023], but we try to be ahead of the game all the time and do things differently and better, and that’s where the control room comes in,” Plugge told CW.
“We want to have a better and safer environment for our sports directors who are always looking at their phones [in the car], and now we have a lot of information coming from one source which is the control room. I think next year you will see more teams doing the same.”
Plugge’s confidence stems from his team having a history in the past five years of progressing advancements in the sport. “You have seen it with all of our innovations, including the food coach [app] and other teams also now work with a food coach,” he said. “We try to drive the sport, and the coming of Red Bull [who became co-title sponsors of Bora-hansgrohe ahead of the Tour] is very good as they will drive innovation as well, like Ineos always did.”
In a swipe at the UCI, Plugge said: “I hope the UCI will embrace it, because sometimes I have the feeling that they want to go back in time, but we need to move ahead, look into the future.”
CW asked various other teams at the Tour whether they are considering copying Visma’s mobile control room, but none expressed an interest in doing so in the near-future.
Visma are currently second in the Tour with defending champion Jonas Vingegaard sitting more than three minutes behind UAE-Team Emirates’s Tadej Pogačar after stage 15.
