Fancy a Tour de France bike for yourself? Well, you can have one. UCI rules say that everything used in top-level racing must be available to the consumer, or soon become available, so you can certainly lay your hands on anything you fancy – as long as you’re prepared to stump up enough cash.
Ah yeah, that’s the slight stumbling block. Money! The pros get the best stuff. The top-of-the-range stuff. Anything that’ll give them an advantage. And the sponsors like to get their premium products out there in the spotlight while millions of eyes are on cycling, of course. So, how much are we talking?
We’ve done a roundup of Tour de France pro bikes you can buy yourself. The least expensive bike in that little collection is £8,000, although most are over £10,000 these days.
Now let’s look at a specific bike that’s used by one of the professionals in this year’s Tour de France, and let’s go right to the top: defending champion and three-time winner Tadej Pogacar.
Pogacar needs very little introduction, so we’ll keep it brief. He’s won pretty much everything. That’ll do. The 26-year-old Slovenian is in his seventh season with UAE Team Emirates – now UAE Team Emirates – XRG – sponsored by bike brand Colnago.
Pogacar divides most of his time between the Y1Rs, and the V5Rs road bikes, depending on the requirements of the day.
The Y1Rs is designed with aerodynamics in mind, and Colnago sees it as the best choice for flat stages and solo breakaways. On the other hand, the V5Rs is the lightest frame ever produced by Colnago, and it’s designed as an all-rounder, capable of tackling hills and mountains.
The Y1Rs costs from £11,699 while V5Rs prices start at £8,999. That’s the price of a V5Rs with a second-tier Shimano Ultegra Di2 groupset and Vision SC45 wheels through Windwave, Colnago’s UK distributor.
Suppose you’d like the exact spec used by Tadej Pocacar, though. Let’s take the V5Rs that Pogacar rode in the 2025 Amstel Gold Race (the main pic at the top of the page) as an example – a race where, horror of horrors, he finished only second, edged out by Mattias Skjelmose in a three-up sprint.
It’s virtually the same spec as the bike in the picture above, which we saw on top of a Team car at the recent Critérium du Dauphiné (a race that Pogacar won).
You can go to colnago.com and order a V5Rs in exactly the same finish, complete with graphics inspired by Pogacar’s status as the current World Road Race Champion and his rainbow jersey.
Like most teams in the professional peloton, UAE Team Emirates uses Shimano’s top-level Dura-Ace Di2 groupset. No problem, you can order a V5Rs that’s specced with Dura-Ace.
> Read our Shimano Dura-Ace R9200 groupset review
Wheels? UAE Team Emirates are sponsored by US brand Enve Composites.
Again, no problem. Colnago allows you to spec Enve SES 4.5 wheels, the same model as pictured here. Okay, that drives the price up by £5,000 over the Vision SC 45 wheels that come as standard (you can buy an Enve SES 4.5 wheelset separately for £3,350 from Enve’s UK distributor Saddleback, and Enve has just released SES 4.5 Pro wheels, as used by Pogacar, priced at £4,100).
> Read our Enve SES 4.5 wheelset review
Colnago will sell you a complete V5RS bike with a Shimano Dura-Ace Di2 groupset and Enve SES 4.5 wheels for £15,000.
That bike would come with Colnago’s own CC.01 integrated bar/stem, but Pogacar uses an Enve SES Aero Pro One-Piece handlebar that’ll set you back £1,300. Ka-ching! (you could buy a complete V5Rs with a Shimano Dura-Ace Di2 groupset and Vision SC 45 wheels for £10,000, or with Shimano C50 wheels for £13,000).
You can choose a Prologo Scratch M5 CPC saddle or a Selle Italia SLR Boost Superflow saddle on your bike from Colnago, although this year UAE Team Emirates is supplied by Fizik and Pogacar is using an Argo Adaptive (pictured above on his Y1Rs), which will set you back £399.99.
The tyres would be Pirelli P Zero, but UAE Team Emirates is sponsored by Continental. Tadej Pogacar has primarily used Conti Grand Prix 5000 S TR, priced at £84.99 apiece, although he has recently been using the Continental Archetype tyres developed in collaboration with the team. These are priced at £94.99 each.
> Continental releases Tadej Pogacar’s limited edition Archetype racing tyres, priced at £94.99 each
Oh, those chainrings aren’t part of the Shimano Dura-Ace groupset, they’re from Italy’s Carbon-Ti. You’re looking at €275 for an outer ring and €195 for an inner ring – so €470 (about £400) at full RRP.
The bottle cages are Elite Leggero Carbon, weighing just 17g a throw. They’re £29.99 each at full price, and you’ll probably want two of them.
If you really want to be sponsor-correct, UAE Team Emirates uses Elite Fly Tex bottles that cost £5.99 each.
Pogacar uses a Wahoo Element Bolt GPS bike computer. We’re up to the third generation now, priced at £299.99.
That computer has to sit on something. When he rides a Y1Rs, Pogacar has a 3D-printed mount, designed by Dutch studio Hinloopen, that is integrated into the cockpit (above), but this looks like a K-Edge mount on his Amstel Gold V5RS (top picture). You’re looking at about £70 for one of those.
Rather than buying a full bike from Colnago, you could buy everything separately and put it together yourself. Here’s how much it would cost at full RRP (we’ve updated the wheels and tyres from the ones on Pogacar’s Amstel Gold bike pictured at the top of the page to ones that have been released more recently):
- Colnago V5Rs frameset £5,499
- Shimano Dura-Ace Di2 groupset (inc power meter) £4,294.95
- Shimano Dura-Ace pedals £234.99
- Enve SES 4.5 Pro wheels £4,100
- Enve SES Aero Pro One-Piece handlebar £1,300
- Fizik Vento Argo Adaptive saddle £399.99
- Continental Archetype tyres £94.99 x 2 = £189.98
- Carbon-Ti chainrings £400
- Elite Leggero Carbon bottle cages £29.99 x 2 = £59.98
- Elite Fly Tex bottles £5.99 x 2 = £11.98
- Wahoo Element Bolt GPS bike computer £299.99
- K-Edge computer mount £70
- Bikone PowerSet bottom bracket £399
- Total £17,259.86
That’s if you bought all the parts separately, paid full price and didn’t get any discount, which would be a mad way to do it. You’d be able to get some of these parts cheaper if you shopped around.
The other option would be to copy Tadej Pogacar’s lead and just win everything in sight. Then you’ll get several of these bikes thrown your way, and you’ll be paid for the privilege of riding them. Simple.
11 thoughts on “How much does a Tour de France bike cost?”
I read “The Secret Cyclist” a
I read “The Secret Cyclist” a few years ago. He made the point that some of the equipment he used as a pro cyclist was “substandard”. But he had to use whatever the team was contracted to use.
One example was a time trial bike which he claims cost him a top ten place in a grand tour.
This maybe explodes the myth that the pros have always got the best of everything.
However, this was probably 15 to 20 years ago, so things may have changed.
I think that like anything
I think that like anything sponsorship related, you are limited by the quality of that sponsor. Back in the day they used to have custom frames built up which they would then slap their sponsors branding on. These days it would be super easy to see if that had been done because its all carbon fibre with obvious differences between them.
Funnily enough, a few years ago I think it was cannondale had a bunch of bikes at one of these big stage races that were dressed up like their absolutely top tier framesets but which were in face their lower tier carbon. Think s-works paintjob with a pro frameset underneath.
Smoke and mirrors eh.
Mr Blackbird wrote:
I think the gap between top end and mid range has closed so much in the last couple of decades that what once was “substandard” is now pretty much as good as the top end, e.g. Ultegra always used to be a year behind DuraAce when an extra gear was added and didn’t get Di2 at the same time, nowadays innovations tend to be introduced simultaneously. A professional rider told me online some time ago that the only reason to use DuraAce was if you were contracted to and that he’d actually rather use Ultegra, despite the horrendous 273g difference between groupsets, because it was more robust and less prone to failure mid-race.
The face different teams win
The face different teams win stages on very different bikes speaks to the rider still being 99% of the differentiator at this level. By all accounts the V4Rs that Pogacar was riding for a while there isn’t a particularly light or aero bike compared to most of the other brands. Didn’t hurt him too much.
Yes all these things make a difference over 4 hours of racing but these claims like “this is worth 1 min 35 seconds over a stage” are based on silly ideas like it saving 2s over X distance… in a solo ride, doing a constant power.
mctrials23 wrote:
Funnily enough I thought of that on Monday’s stage when Quinn Simmons slowed down to high-five some American spectators, all that money that’s gone into refining the bike to save an extra five seconds over 100 km and he’s just spent the lot.
Rendel Harris wrote:
That’s not how it works. It’s not an individual time trial, it’s about beating the other folk riding along side you. Better bikes and kit is about saving effort with a mass start race like the TdF. The TdF being a race of attrition over several weeks of riding as well as about having more energy left at end of each stage to beat your rivals to the post or get intermediate sprint/hill top points.
Gosh thanks, I never knew
Gosh thanks, nearly 50 years riding and 40 watching the Tour de France and I never knew that. Not entirely sure why you feel the need to hand out such a lecture on the bleeding obvious for what was quite obviously a lighthearted jokey comment.
Pfff! 50 years? Newcomer
Pfff! 50 years? Newcomer
Pogacar’s bottle cages seem
Pogacar’s bottle cages seem like a bargain.
ktache wrote:
They do (well relatively), especially as they’re available discounted for as little as £16.95. However other sources say he has Colnago integrated cages that are £49.95 each…
I had a job interview with a
I had a job interview with a sponsor of one of the teams, they were in a position to offer bikes at the end of the season for around €1,500. Not a replica or same build, but a bike that had been used by the team. I think that prices may have changed now.