BAGNERES-DE-LUCHON, France — As we descend off the back of the Col du Tourmalet, a fan clasps her hands to her head, mouth gaping in disbelief at our speed. Markus Hoelgaard nearly overcooks a wet corner and unclips to stabilize his balance at the last second, with our car and two motos bearing down on him a scant few meters behind. Alexey Lutsenko raises his hand to signal a problem with his front wheel, we pull over on a negative-eight percent gradient, and Kevin Poret pops out of the back seat with a fresh wheel. I time his work from the front seat: 21 seconds. I spent the 2025 Tour de France's fourteenth stage inside the race, in the Shimano neutral service car. It's the closest I could have gotten to the racing without being on two wheels. A charming property of the Tour de France is that the closer you get to the action, the less of the race you'll see. Proximity has an inverse relationship with context. I wanted to see what it was like to have both, and to understand the work of the mechanics who are closer to the action than anyone. Luckily, I was able to do so on the hardest stage of the Tour's Pyrenean turn, a 182-kilometer beast with four categorized climbs, each of which has its own place in Tour de France lore.

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