What’s more exciting than watching the Tour de France shoot past in all its three-dimensional technicolour? Maybe, just maybe, driving just ahead of it in a car decked out as a cauliflower.
There’s a second Tour de France that the cameras don’t show: one awash with branded bucket hats and inflatable animals, giant four-by-four vegetables climbing mountains and vehicles that have, through the years, rolled past spectators disguised as a leek, cherry, melon and strawberry. The Tour de France caravan.
Now, E.Leclerc, the Tour’s supermarket sponsor, is looking for someone to drive its latest vegetable vehicle: a giant cauliflower.
The recruitment criteria is alarmingly scant: you should have a drivers license; be friendly (you’ll literally be driving around in a giant cauliflower) and available from 2-26 July for the men’s race, and from 1-10 August for the women’s race.
Strength enough to bat away spectators who get too close to the open-top car is also a requirement, as is the ability to navigate both flat roads and mountain passes thick with excited fans; all while maintaining enough distance from the peloton to avoid being caught, and a cruisy enough speed to keep the spectators happy. Easy.
“They need to have had their B license for more than three years, and have a bit of a CV because it's not easy to drive,” the president of the E.Leclerc centers' Strategic Committee, Michel-Édouard Leclerc, said in an interview with the LCI television channel. “It’s an electric car.”
A post shared by Cycling Weekly (@cyclingweeklymagazine)
A photo posted by on
The cauliflower will be one of nearly 50 vehicles in the Tour’s famous caravan. Devised in 1930 by the race's founder, Henri Desgrange, the caravan was a way the Tour could finance the purchase of tour-specific bikes.
Now, nearly 100 years later, the caravan has become such a core part of the event that according to a 2017 polling by Le Tour, 47% of fans come out to see the spectacle, rather than the race itself. And it’s no wonder; the parade traces every kilometre of the race’s route in 45 minutes of uninterrupted flying freebies thrown from car after sponsored car.
If you’d like to be in with a chance of driving one of the supermarket’s fabled vegetables around the Tour de France route, you’ll have to act quick.
"The selection process is underway,” Leclerc continued, “there are many applicants.”
Regardless of the race now afoot to become the next cauliflower chauffeur, Leclerc stressed that the main point of the big vehicular vegetable is, really, to spread a bit of joy.
“That's the point of the caravan,” Leclerc finished. “It has to be a celebration. It showcases French products, it shows support for French products, but it's also cheerful and fun.”
