Having covered the world's greatest bike race for the Guardian for 10 years, I have lost count of the number of times people have asked if I follow the race on my bike. The only answer is a hollow laugh. The Tour de France is the ultimate celebration of things two-wheeled, but the cyclists are outnumbered by cars 20-to-one, and the tour produces traffic jams that would give ecologists nightmares.
And we, the race's 5,000 followers, live in our cars. Everything (yes, everything) happens in and from tour cars: team managers use them as the equivalent of the touchline, driving alongside cyclists and yelling instructions at them. Referees observe cheats and penalise them. Cyclists take tows on the sly, grab drinks and food from them, and are paced back to the pack by them. Doctors tend bee stings and bandage the wounds of competitors riding alongside. Mechanics oil chains and adjust saddles, leaning out at impossible angles. Corporate guests are wined and dined. Journalists eat, drink, sleep, watch TV and file stories from their cars.
This year, the bulk of those cars, including mine, come from Skoda, official vehicle supplier to the race. Their arrival en masse in an event held up as the supreme embodiment of Frenchness seems a little incongruous - until you learn that, when Skoda was founded in 1895, it did not make cars but bikes, before arriving at four wheels via motorbikes.
Even though Skoda is about as French a name as James Bond, the race and the cars do have one thing in common: both Skoda and the tour are brand names in the process of removing unfortunate associations from the past and making strenuous attempts to change the way the public see them. The bike race is trying to throw off all those unfortunate connections with performance-enhancing drugs; with the cars, it's all those old Skoda jokes. And before anyone starts sniggering at the back, the Guardian's new Octavia didn't need anything acquired from a dodgy Italian doctor in a camper van to make it faster. In fact, having observed the race for almost three weeks, I'd argue that Skoda is rebranding rather more successfully.
The first plus point with Skoda is that it chooses sensible names for its cars, rather than something vaguely Greek, like dildo or hubris. Octavia has a refreshingly down-to-earth, home-counties boarding school, twinset-and-labrador ring to it, while the top brass on the tour are driving a Skoda model called simply Superb, which at least sets out its stall and says what it is supposed to be. The Octavia is actually rather like a Ford Mondeo, which for this sort of mid-market small family or rep-mobile is probably not a bad selling point, particularly as it comes in rather cheaper than the Mondeo and has more solid handling.
If the front grille of the Octavia has a look of the old BMW about it, the fact that the chassis is by Volkswagen shows in its handling: there is little to induce howls of excitement, but the cornering is reliable, with no feeling of drift on back roads, hairpinned mountain passes or when swerving round cows. The suspension feels harder than that of your average mid-range saloon, with less of a blancmange sensation, so passengers are less likely to emerge from the vehicle on their hands and knees.
In its way, the Octavia is what you would expect from eastern Europe by way of Germany. There is nothing frivolous here, just a couple of mild eccentricities, most notably the speedometer, which gets to 80mph and then switches from 10-mile increments to 20-mile ones, so that 100mph is where 90 should be. The French police have recently cracked down on speeding on the autoroute and "Oh, pardon, monsieur, my speedometer is mildly eccentric" will not cut much ice with les flics.
There is a little less grunt about the 1.9-litre diesel engine than you might get with a 2.0 elsewhere, but this has a handy flipside. In low gears, there is no feeling that the engine is running away with you. The Octavia feels like a car, not an articulated lorry. There are handy touches too: a nice dangly rubber thing to close the boot with; you can turn the front airbag off if you want to put a childseat in the passenger seat; and, charmingly, the boot has a neat little netted place to stop bottles of wine rolling around - and it's bigger than the old Octavia's. We put three people's luggage in there, and it burped and asked for more.
Most helpful, however, is the parsimonious fuel consumption, which is where the modern diesel scores hands down over its petrol counterpart. The literature says that, in the combined cycle, our Octavia would manage 53mpg. I found that, on everything from mountain passes to motorways, it managed more than 500 miles on rather less than a tankful. Two wheels and pedals may be the most energy-efficient form of transport known to man, and the tour's 2,100 miles in three weeks is the ultimate expression of that, but the Octavia is the motoring equivalent of Lance Armstrong: a very lean machine indeed.
· Giles Smith is away.
