Tour Secrets: TPU Tubes & Tire Pressure
The Tour de France is a race between athletes, but the bikes matter, too. This year, there’s been a lot of talk about radical aero wheels, lightweight parts, even personal touches that distinguish the bikes of riders on the same team. Some teams run 25 mm tires for time trials—echoing our findings that tires wider than 25 mm aren’t faster, at least on smooth roads. For road stages, most pros go up to 28 or 30 mm, apparently preferring the superior grip and (perhaps) puncture resistance of wider tires.
One thing has been missing from the discussion this year: What is inside those tires? In the past, most teams ran their tires tubeless, with a few ‘holdouts’ preferring the extra speed of latex tubes. What about this year? Are any of the teams on TPU tubes, which offer the same speed as latex—in real-road testing—with even less weight? The answer is… silence.
Unless a tire comes off during a stage—which thankfully happens very, very rarely—or you can look over the shoulder of a mechanic as they change a tire, it’s impossible to know what’s hiding inside the pros’ tires.
Do the pros run TPU tubes? I talked to our TPU tube supplier, and here’s what they told me: “All the teams keep that a big secret. We know from bike suppliers that teams request TPU tubes, but how and when they use them is something we don’t know. We provide between 800 and 1,000 TPU tubes annually for team supplies.”
Eight hundred to a thousand tubes is a lot—especially since that’s just one supplier. This roughly matches the number of tires a big pro team goes through in a year—and tubes last longer than tires. Does that mean that most pros ‘secretly’ are riding on TPU tubes? I doubt it. Tubeless tires with inserts have better run-flat capabilities, although racers now run wider tires—and much lower pressures—than in the past, and flats are far less common. However, the demand for TPU tubes by pro teams suggests that a significant number of tires in the Tour are hiding TPU tubes. And I predict that number will only go up in coming years. After all, the pros took a while to adopt wider tires, too—long after most of us had already upsized the rubber on our bikes.
Tire pressure appears to be another closely-held secret these days. I must have read dozens of articles about tire choices in the 2026 Tour, but I haven’t found any mention of tire pressure. A few years ago, Tadej Pogačar was reported to run a pressure that matched exactly what the Rene Herse Tire Pressure Calculator suggested for his weight and setup. These days, teams seem to treat information about tire pressures as proprietary, since it might give them an advantage over the competition.
The equipment choices of the pros are governed by many factors: sponsorship commitments, an aversion to change and the associated risk… The rest of us can jump ahead, just like we did with wider tires and, more recently, TPU tubes. That’s why we are offering our TPU-specific 700×31 Orondo Grade tires with a matching TPU tube as a set.
We offer a choice of five different valves. New is the 70 mm threaded valve (left)—ideal if you’re a pro trying to make your deep-dish wheels look like they’re set up tubeless.🙂
Of course, you can also run all other Rene Herse tires with TPU tubes.
And the fastest tire pressure isn’t a secret, either. Our updated Tire Pressure Calculator 3.0, with more detailed inputs and even more accurate pressure recommendations, is free to use for anybody. Whether you’re a Tour de France pro looking for that last bit of speed, or simply want to optimize comfort and grip of your bike, dialing the tire pressure is one of the best ‘upgrades’ you can make—and it’s free.
More Information:
- TPU tubes
- TPU-specific 700×31 tires
- Tire Pressure Calculator 3.0
- Why are 25mm tires faster than 23mm, but 28mm isn’t faster than 25mm? It’s all in our book The All-Road Bike Revolution.
Photo credit: Jered Gruber (Photos 1-3), used with permission
