Skoda L&K 130 revealed as ultimate cycle race support car

Skoda and bicycles are intrinsically linked. The company's can be traced back to Laurin & Klement, a company founded in 1895 as a manufacturer of bicycles. To this day, Skoda still makes bikes, and has been the official vehicle partner of the Tour de France since 2004. 

It's a surprise, then, that it's taken this long for the firm's 'Azubi' student projects department to tap into this, but with the L&K 130, the Skoda Vocational School has done so in style. 

It's the latest in a long line of one-off concepts, previous examples of which include the 'Mountiaq', a Kodiaq turned into a lifted pick-up truck, and the Sunroq, a Karoq with its roof hacked off.  The L&K 130 meanwhile started as a Superb estate, before being reimagined as a do-it-all cycle race support car. We had the chance to try all three plus several other previous Azubi projects - more on that later. 

The most obvious modification is at the rear, where you'll find a pick-up style load bed and bike holder that extends. The rear wheels of the bikes are on the load bed, and the fronts are on the roof of the Superb. As the load bed is extended, the bikes are rotate slightly, making them much easier to remove or reinstall. There's also a third, more conventional bike carrier for the roof. 

Inside, there's a display on the passenger side of the dashboard to show race footage and data,  a radio, another screen behind the passenger seat for a service technician to use, a big cooler for mid-race nourishment and a roof storage net hanging from 3D-printed mounts. 

Access from the rear passenger side is done via a door that opens in-line with the car, not with a traditional sliding mechanism, but a clever and very intricate-looking set of hinges. The idea being it removes the chance of someone opening a door into Tom Pidcock and his competitors. 

The interior also has a gold, red and black theme to match the outside, a combination chosen in a nod to the original L&K logo, which you'll also find on the bonnet in 3D printed form. The exterior livery, by the way, wasn't achieved through a wrap or decals - it's all painted. 

Given that fact, and all the bespoke touches, it should come as no surprise that the project ate up around 2,000 working hours in total. Easing the nerves of getting to have a drive in this one-off, irreplaceable car effectively, we were only allowed to drive it at relatively slow speeds around a velodrome in suburban Prague. The L&K 130, you see, is not road legal. 

At those speeds, it drives much like any other Superb, other than the very usual sight of the reworked rear end whenever you glance in the mirrors, and the occasional noise of the bikes moving around in the carriers when going over a bump. 

The plug-in hybrid system is unchanged from the production car, featuring a 1.5-litre, four-cylinder engine, an electric motor and a 25.7 kWh battery pack for a total system power of 204PS. With an electric-only range of up to 84 miles, the Superb PHEV stands a good chance of completing a good chunk of the average Tour de France stage without spewing out any petrol fumes. 

All of the Azubi cars we sampled were fun and unusual to drive in their own way, with perhaps the highlight being the Citijet, a CitiGo transformed into a brilliantly silly roadster with an obnoxiously loud exhaust. 

Whatever the students come up with for 2026, it's going to be something very special.