PRETTY DAMNED MARVELLOUS

Team Association should be a game all cycling fans play. Name a team. Then say whatever first comes into mind. La Vie Claire: kit. Festina: doping. US Postal Service: Armstrong. ONCE: Alex Zulle’s spectacles. Molteni: Merckx. Sky: the line (and where you draw it). And…PDM: bus.

Nowadays, every team has a bus, even outside the WorldTour. The vehicle is integral to professional cycling, so much so that when Team Sky were in the pre-launch phase, the design of the bus was a real topic of conversation. The ‘Death Star’, as David Millar once dubbed it, was an integral part of the iconography and ethos of the team and how they wanted to project themselves.

But team buses haven’t been around for that long. The team bus as we know it began with PDM in the late 1980s. Cyrille Guimard’s team did have one, earlier in the decade, but it sticks in no one’s minds. The big black behemoth with the tinted windows was where the Dutch team truly made their mark. In 1989, other teams still had camper vans; in 1991 you could still interview a bike rider sitting on the bonnet of a team car with nowhere to hide before a race began. PDM were different.

Take a May 1989 interview from magazine where writer Rupert Guinness travelled with Sean Kelly and PDM to Milan-San Remo. “PDM chauffeur Rob van der Merwe proudly captained his glossy black Mercedes passenger bus through Northern Italy, from the Adriatic coast to the industrial capital