Tour de France pro bike: Mads Pedersen’s custom-painted Trek Madone

For tech aficionados, the Tour de France is the place to be. It’s always a hotbed for the hottest new tech, from new bikes and components to custom setups.

It’s equally as common to see custom paint jobs, but it’s rare that we find ones that stand out from the crowd quite as much as Mads Pedersen’s custom-painted Trek Madone SLR 9 Gen 7. 

With new sponsors onboard, Lidl-Trek are sporting new kits for the 2023 Tour de France and they’ve teamed them up with custom-painted bikes too.

Each rider had the opportunity to customise their own bike's paintwork and Pedersen’s was far from the only eye-catching design, but Simon Richardson thinks it just edges the rest in the race to be the most bling bike at this year’s Tour de France.

The iridescent design is made possible by Trek’s in-house Project One service where the American brand will custom-paint a bike to any specifications. Having seen the bikes the Lidl-Trek team are riding, we’re big fans of their work.

The Trek Madone SLR 9 Gen 7 that the paintwork adorns is equally as unique and garnered plenty of attention after last year’s launch thanks to its IsoFlow technology. It revamps the seat tube with what, to the untrained eye, appears to be a hole at the top of the tube with the seat post hovering above as if defying gravity. In reality, Trek says that it leads to aero gains and saves weight.

GCN

Unique IsoFlow technology.

For his Tour de France setup, Pedersen opted for noticeably narrow 37cm handlebars with the shifters angled inwards, something that is becoming more common in the race for any aero advantage.

The bike we checked out was Pedersen’s training bike which had a standard chain and cassette. On his race bike these are both gold, something SRAM supplies to all of its current and former world champions.

Other notable features included a monster 56/43-tooth SRAM RED eTap AXS chainset and it’s paired with a wide 10-33t cassette to provide plenty of gears. You may be wondering whether the pros actually ever use the 56-10 combination at any point or whether the cassette and chainrings are picked for efficiency. Si posed the question to SRAM who - depressingly for us mortals - confirmed that they do.

Check out the full breakdown of components below.

Bike Specification