Paris-Roubaix has always had a habit of making fools of perfectly good road bikes. Riders can turn up with the fastest, lightest, most wind-cheating machine in the world, and within a few sectors, feel like they have brought a toothpick to a demolition site.
From a tech perspective, the most revealing thing about the race isn’t perhaps who wins – though chapeau to Wout van Aert and Franziska Koch – but how the peloton bends the rules of what a road bike is allowed to be in order to survive it.
This year at the men’s race, we saw tyres grow in size again to as big as 35mm. Single chainrings, or 1x drivetrains, are also the firm Roubaix favorite, even if the way teams are achieving them is increasingly archaic. Plus, we spotted plenty of small, telling compromises, some of which look more like damage limitation than optimisation.