Tour de France 2015 Bikes: Tony Martin's Specialized Roubaix

Tony Martin capped a dramatic stage 4 of the 2015 Tour de France by soloing to victory inside the last few kilometres. And he did it a Specialized Roubaix, although not on the bike he started the stage on, but instead he crossed the line on teammate Matteo Trentin's bike after a late bike swap because of a flat tyre.

We'll have to check, but has anyone ever won a Tour stage on someone else's bike before? Answers in the comments section below if you know.

However, up until that bike swap, Tony Martin had been riding the very bike pictured in this article. We photographed it on the Thursday before the start of the 2015 Tour de France, after most of the team had been out for a spin on bikes we normally only see at races like Paris-Roubaix. With cobbles seemingly becoming a regular sight in the Tour, these bikes are getting a bit more regular use.

The Roubaix was designed to conquer races involving pavé, or at least very rough roads. With a longer wheelbase, more relaxed geometry and space for wider tyres, and packing Zertz inserts in the fork legs and seat stays, it’s a bike designed to smooth the ride and making racing over cobbles a little less uncomfortable.

Martin’s bike is built with a Shimano Dura-Ace Di2 groupset and he uses an FSA K-Force Light carbon fibre crankset fitted with a Power2Max power meter. The rest of the Etixx team predominantly use SRM Power Meters, except Martin.

He uses Shimano Dura-Ace SPD-SL pedals, as most of the team do, which was lucky for him as he was able to swap bikes as easily as he did.

The chainset is fitted with a 53/46t chainring combination, that’s a change that most make as there’s simply no need for the small 39t inner chainring on a stage that features no significant climbs.

FSA supply the team with handlebars, stems and seatpost. The seatpost is a carbon K-Force item with a matching carbon stem, but he uses an aluminium handlebar. Something we noticed on a lot of the cobbles bikes, and we see it here, is a lot of bar tape wrapped nearly to the stem. That’s because the riders spend more time on the tops rather than the hoods.

We spotted Tony Martin’s spare Roubaix bike above was fitted with an additional set of brake levers, but his race bike doesn’t have them. That could be a choice influenced by the weather conditions, if it was likely to be extremely wet having the extra brake levers could be a useful asset.

Atop the post is what appears to be a modified Specialized Romin saddle. It’s a firm saddle, a thumb press detected absolutely no padding to speak off.

There’s a regular set of Tacx plastic bottle cages.

The wheels are Roval CLX40 Rapide carbon fibre tubulars, which have a 40mm rim depth. These aren’t the tyres the Tony Martin will have been riding today, rumour is that Specialized had a selection of different width FMB tubulars to choose. It’s likely that the team would have waited to the last possible moment to take a call on tyre choice, taking into account the likely weather conditions.

More bikes from the 2015 Tour de France here.