Fifteen minutes of adrenaline

     When Ray Deslaurier, the national sales manager for Eddy Merckx Cycles’ Canadian distributor Kempter Marketing told me about his experience in the Quickstep team car Sunday I knew exactly where he was coming from. “I’m just happy I survived,” he said Monday during coffee break at the Expocycle Trade Show in Montreal. “If a police officer drove around in one of those team cars for a lap they’d shut the whole race down.” Of course, there were plenty of Montreal’s finest on hand for Sunday’s Grand Prix de Cycliste ProTour race and they were well aware of the tire-screeching driving techniques of the team directors.

The race organizers had set up the European-based squads with Kia hatchbacks equipped with massive Thule roof racks and I think it’s fair to say the car designers didn’t have this type of driving in mind when they envisioned the family-oriented Kias.

The race caravan of a professional road race is kind of like a NASCAR race – chaotic to say the least. You take a pile of former bike racers, put them behind the wheels of cars and add in the distractions of race lists, road maps, cell phones, race radios and team radios and you’ve got a frightening combination.

My opportunity to test my intestinal fortitude came in the passenger seat of Team SpiderTech’s Cadillac CTS Wagon with cycling legend Steve Bauer behind the wheel. There were three laps left in Sunday’s 16-lap race and Bauer, directing the Canadian national team pieced together specifically for this race, was near the back of the caravan.

The car itself was a pretty sweet setup. In the back seat was a team mechanic with four pairs of Shimano Dura-Ace race wheels and on the roof was a handful of gorgeous ‘spare’ bikes. Up front, there was a complete list of all the riders in the race taped to the dash. On the sun visor above Bauer’s head was the race radio spitting out information on laps and time gaps. Mounted to the centre console was the SpiderTech team radio to keep the director sportif in constant contact with his riders. Then there was Bauer’s Blackberry, which he used throughout the race to connect with team partner Josee Larocque, who handles the public relations and gets people like me rides in the team car mid-race. Oh and there’s one more important tool in the Cadillac – the horn. It’s in use constantly during races.

Getting back to the lap, in my case, the ride came late in a very difficult race where many of the Canadian riders were struggling. The first rider we made contact with was David Boily. He had been dropped off the back of the last group of riders and was on his own. “Should I keep going?” he said over the team radio. “That’s up to you,” Bauer replied. “He doesn’t want to give up,” he said. Boily never did call it quits – riding solo to the bitter end.

Next came the massive climb up Mont-Royale. Tens of thousands of fans had lined the climb and they were cheering and waving Canadian flags as the SpiderTech car drove up. At one point, off in the distance and in behind where the fans were squeezing in on the race course, a rider in a full Team Canada/SpiderTech kit was riding up the hill on his own. “That’s Kevin (Lacombe),” Bauer said, pointing out his rider who had earlier abandoned the race and was now inconspicuously pedalling up the climb. “He must be training for next year.”

As we crested the climb and started coming back down we came up on Dominique Rollin – a fantastic ProTour racer who was having a tough day on the hilly Montreal route. As we drove past him, Rollin looked over into the window of the car in some obvious discomfort. Bauer immediately spoke into the team radio. “Dom, come over.” Rollin quickly darted behind the team vehicle and, for a few seconds, used the rear bumper to his aerodynamic advantage before blasting past the car on the fastest downhill of the course.

Throughout the lap, Bauer was super cool. Darting around corners, flying in and out of race caravan traffic and driving within inches of riders, other cars and course barriers is just par for the course. All the while, he was constantly relaying information to his riders on time gaps and who was doing what near the front of the peloton.

As both Deslaurier and I found out, this brief road trip is not for the weak-stomached, but it certainly was fun.