The UCI has made it illegal to put a pocket on the front of a racing jersey. That sounds like the most trivial rule in the sport's history. But it lands on 1 July 2026, three days before the Tour de France rolls out of the start house, and it's the visible tip of a much bigger crackdown on aerodynamics, data and rider safety. So here's the version with the dates done right: what actually changes on 1 July, what has quietly been law since 2021, and what doesn't start until 2028.

Key takeaways

- From 1 July 2026, front jersey pockets are banned in UCI competition. Pockets must sit on the rear of the garment. The only front exception is a pocket for a radio.

- Live glucose and lactate readings are banned on bike computers, but this is not new. It dates to 2021 under Article 1.3.006 bis. Power and heart rate remain fully legal.

- The 126 × 71 mm bike-computer size cap is a separate, future rule that starts 1 January 2028, not July 2026. No head unit on sale today is banned by it.

- None of this touches amateurs. The rules apply only to UCI-sanctioned races, not sportives or your Sunday club run.

- The 2026 Tour de France (4–26 July) is the first Grand Tour raced entirely under the new pocket ban.

If you've seen the headline "UCI bans front jersey pockets" and want the organised version, what changes, when, why, and whether it touches your kit or your favourite rider, this is the piece. Almost every news report has blurred three separate threads together. I'll pull them apart, separate the genuinely new from the merely re-stated, and answer the questions people are actually typing into search boxes.

What changes on 1 July 2026 — the short version

Here's the scannable summary, because the single biggest problem with the existing coverage is that it mashes together rules with very different start dates. Read this section first and you're already ahead of most of the cycling press.

Three changes land on 1 July 2026:

1. Front jersey pockets are banned. Internal or external pockets on the front of a racing jersey are no longer permitted. Pockets "must be located exclusively on the rear of the garment." The sole exception is a pocket "intended solely to hold a radio communication device."
2. A revised table of sanctions for non-compliant equipment and rider-worn accessories takes effect. The UCI says it's designed to "strengthen its deterrent effect and ensure a more systematic application of consistent sanctions."
3. A clarified data-display framework gets restated: bike computers may show heart rate, body temperature and sweat rate in real time, but live glucose and lactate readings are off-limits.

What is NOT new on 1 July 2026:

• The glucose and lactate display ban is from 2021, not 2026. The June 2026 announcement mostly re-confirms a rule that already existed.
• Power data is not banned. It never was. Only metabolic and biochemical values (glucose, lactate) are singled out.

What does NOT start until 1 January 2028:

• The bike-computer size cap of 126 × 71 mm. This one's still a year and a half out. If you've read that "the UCI is banning big bike computers," that change arrives eighteen months after the pocket ban and bans nothing currently on sale.

The whole package was approved by the UCI Management Committee at its meeting in Desenzano del Garda, Italy, and announced via a press release dated 5 June 2026. The rules apply to UCI-sanctioned competition, meaning WorldTour, ProSeries, Class 1 and the like, and not to amateur sportives or non-sanctioned group rides.

Key takeaway: Only the pocket ban and the sanctions table are genuinely new for July 2026. Keep the three dates straight — 2021, 2026, 2028 — and the rest of this story makes sense.

The front-pocket ban, explained

The core rule is simple and slightly surreal. From 1 July 2026, a racing jersey's pockets have to be on the rear of the garment, full stop. There's exactly one front exception: a pocket designed solely to hold a radio communication device, which teams need for race-radio earpieces and transponders. Everything else that used to live on a rider's chest is now banned.

To understand why a governing body bothered to legislate pocket placement, you need to know what those front pockets were actually being used for. And it wasn't nutrition. Here's the UCI's own account: "At the beginning of 2026, the UCI observed that several riders were wearing jerseys featuring front internal pockets containing nutritional products that were generally not consumed because they were extremely difficult, or even impossible in race conditions, to access. These pockets result in significant alterations to the riders' body shape."

Read that carefully. The bars and gels stuffed into those front pockets were "generally not consumed." They weren't food. They were ballast, shaping wax for the human body. Pack the chest and stomach area and you smooth out your frontal profile, turning the gap between chest and bars into a cleaner aerodynamic surface. GCN put it bluntly: the loaded front pockets created "an aerodynamic fairing." Teams had figured out that a jersey pocket, correctly stuffed, is a legal-until-now aero device worth real watts at racing speed.

This is about as classic a cycling story as it gets. A grey area opens, smart teams exploit it for marginal gains, the advantage becomes visible (riders with oddly bulging, sculpted torsos), and the UCI moves to shut it down. The front pocket now joins a long line of banned aero hacks, the "superman" position and the Obree tuck among them, where the governing body decided the gain came at too high a cost to safety, fairness or the look of the sport.

A quick decision checklist — is a jersey legal under the new rule?

• [ ] Are all pockets on the rear of the garment? If yes, you're compliant.
• [ ] Is there a front pocket? If it's anything other than a dedicated radio pocket, it's now illegal in UCI races.
• [ ] Does the garment alter the rider's morphology (padding, inserts, stuffed pouches that reshape the torso)? That's independently prohibited. More on that in the next section.
• [ ] Is this an amateur sportive or non-UCI ride? Then none of this applies. Wear whatever you like.

Key takeaway: The ban targets a hidden aero trick — front pockets used as a body-reshaping fairing — not the humble rear pocket where you actually keep your food.

Why the UCI cares — aero, fairness and crash severity

The UCI's justification is worth quoting in full, because it shows how the governing body now treats technology and safety as a single problem. The central argument: "Given the established link between aerodynamic gains, increased speed and the severity of accidents, and considering that the practice also raises issues of sporting fairness, the UCI has decided that jersey pockets must be located exclusively on the rear of the garment."

Unpack that and you get three distinct arguments bundled into one sentence:

1. Aero begets speed begets carnage. The logic runs like this: every aerodynamic gain raises peloton speed, and higher speed makes crashes more severe. A pocket fairing that shaves a few watts contributes, at the margin, to a faster and therefore more dangerous bunch. Whether a single pocket meaningfully moves peloton speed is debatable, honestly. But the principle is now explicit policy: the federation will police even small aero gains in the name of safety.
2. Sporting fairness. A loaded front pocket is an invisible, unregulated piece of equipment. Two riders in identical team kit could be running very different aero setups depending on how cleverly they'd stuffed their jerseys. The UCI frames that as an integrity problem, not just a safety one.
3. The practical safety argument. Front pockets are simply harder to reach than rear ones. A rider fumbling at their own chest to extract a bar mid-race, one hand off the bars in a tight bunch, "could create an unsafe situation." The rear pocket, reached behind the hip, is the established and safer convention.

There's a telling enforcement signal here: the UCI is already policing rider morphology before the dedicated pocket ban even bites. In June 2026, Jan-Willem van Schip (Azerion-Villa Valkenburg) was disqualified from the final stage of the Ronde de l'Oise after officials ruled that a bottle tucked under his jersey was non-compliant clothing. He wasn't judged under the new pocket rule, which doesn't take effect until 1 July, but under the existing Article 1.3.032, which states that clothing "may not modify the morphology of the rider." The message to teams couldn't be clearer: the federation will use whatever rule it has on hand to stop riders reshaping their bodies for aero gain, and from July it has a purpose-built one.

Pro tip for teams and kit designers: compliance isn't just "move the pocket to the back." Any garment feature, whether padding, inserts, a tucked bidon or a stuffed pouch, that alters the rider's silhouette is exposed under 1.3.032 regardless of where the pocket sits. Design for a natural body profile, not a sculpted one.

Key takeaway: The UCI has fused aerodynamics and safety into one policy: gains that raise speed or distort body shape now count as crash-risk and fairness problems, and the Van Schip DQ proves it'll enforce that view aggressively.

The data-display rule: what riders can and can't see

This is the single most misreported part of the whole package, so let me be precise. The June 2026 head-unit rules say bike computers may display heart rate, body temperature and sweat rate in real time, but that live glucose and lactate readings are banned. The headline that "the UCI is banning race data" is just wrong. The vast majority of what a rider sees on screen, speed, distance, power, cadence, heart rate, navigation, gradient, is completely untouched.

The line the UCI draws is between physiological data it considers acceptable and metabolic and biochemical data it doesn't. Heart rate is fine. Body temperature (via sensors like CORE) is fine. Sweat and hydration rate is fine. Power, the single most important training and racing metric of the last two decades, is explicitly not banned and stays permitted. The only values singled out are glucose and lactate, the two biochemical markers that tell a rider, in real time, exactly how deep into their energy systems they are.

For fans watching the 2026 Tour, the practical upshot is that nothing about the on-screen data your favourite riders use will look any different. Wahoo's 2026 firmware even added native fields for CORE temperature, Tymewear breathing, FLOWBIO sweat/sodium and hDrop electrolytes, a whole new generation of non-metabolic wearables that are perfectly legal precisely because they measure ventilation, temperature and hydration rather than blood chemistry. The marginal-gains arms race in sensors is alive and well. It's just been steered away from glucose and lactate.

Pro tip: If you race UCI events and use a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) in training, that's fine. But you have to remove or fully cover it for competition. The ban is on having and using the device in the race, not on training with it. More on that in the next two sections, because the enforcement history here is brutal and instructive.

Key takeaway: Only glucose and lactate are banned from live display. Power and heart rate are untouched. The "data ban" is far narrower than the headlines suggest.

Wait — wasn't glucose already banned? The 2021 backstory

Here's the part almost every 2026 news write-up skips, and it's the key to the whole story: the metabolic-data ban is not a 2026 invention. It dates to summer 2021, when the UCI added a rule prohibiting devices that "capture other physiological data, including any metabolic values such as but not limited to glucose or lactate." That rule is Article 1.3.006 bis, the same article number that keeps surfacing in coverage of the size cap, because the UCI keeps bolting new onboard-technology provisions onto it. The June 2026 "clarification" largely re-states a ban that's been live for five seasons.

The original 2021 justification was strikingly thin. The UCI's stated reason for banning continuous glucose monitors was that "there is no evidence proving that it could improve the safety of the non-diabetic riders." Notice the framing. The burden was placed on the technology to prove it improves safety, rather than on the UCI to prove it harms anything. That inverted logic runs right through the federation's tech policy, and it's exactly why critics have been so loud.

A few facts make the CGM ban genuinely unusual:

• The UCI is the only professional sports governing body that bans continuous glucose monitors in competition. CGMs are legal in Ironman triathlon. They're legal in everyday life and in training. Pro cycling stands alone.
• The ban applies only in UCI competition. Riders can, and do, use CGMs and metabolic sensors freely in training and in non-UCI races. The science of fuelling is being done with these tools every day. It just has to come off for race day.
• A medical exemption exists on paper but not in practice. The UCI allows riders to wear glucose monitors in competition with medical proof of a condition such as amenorrhea, but as of reporting, no such exemption had ever been approved. The door is technically open and functionally shut.

The wider context is a federation with a well-documented suspicion of race technology it doesn't control. Back in 2018, UCI president David Lappartient backed a motion to ban power meters in racing to "preserve the attractiveness of the sport." The proposal went nowhere, but it tells you the institutional instinct. EF team manager Jonathan Vaughters summed up the UCI's approach with a line that's become a refrain among riders and engineers: "If they can't understand it, they ban it."

Key takeaway: The glucose/lactate ban is a 2021 rule (Article 1.3.006 bis), not a 2026 one, and the UCI is the only major sport to ban CGMs in competition — a stance critics call precautionary to the point of being anti-innovation.

The Kristen Faulkner case — how the rule bites in practice

Abstract regulations only become real when someone loses a result, and the metabolic-data ban has a clear human face: Kristen Faulkner. At the 2023 Strade Bianche, raced on 4 March 2023, Faulkner crossed the line in third place. She was then disqualified for "wearing a continuous glucose monitoring sensor throughout the event," a direct breach of Article 1.3.006 bis. A podium at one of the most prestigious one-day races on the calendar, gone over a coin-sized patch on her arm.

What makes the case a lightning rod is the detail. The sensor Faulkner wore was an Abbott Libre Sense, the platform behind Supersapiens, the metabolic-fuelling system several pros had adopted. Faulkner's account was that the sensor was never connected and transmitted no data during the race. By her telling, it gathered nothing, displayed nothing and gave her no advantage. The UCI disqualified her anyway, enforcing the letter of the rule. The offence is wearing the prohibited device in competition, not gaining a competitive edge from it.

That distinction matters enormously for any rider weighing the risk. The rule doesn't ask whether the device helped you. It doesn't ask whether it was switched on. If a banned metabolic sensor is on your body during a UCI race, your result is exposed. The Supersapiens CEO later wrote to the UCI urging cooperation to "improve rider health and safety," arguing the federation was shutting out a tool that could protect athletes, particularly women managing energy availability and conditions like amenorrhea, the very condition the (unused) medical exemption was supposedly designed for.

Decision framework — should you race a UCI event with a metabolic sensor?

1. Is the event UCI-sanctioned? If no, the sensor is legal. Proceed. If yes, continue.
2. Do you have a UCI-approved medical exemption in hand? If no, and remember, none has ever been granted, the sensor is illegal regardless of whether it's connected.
3. Is the sensor merely covered or "off"? Irrelevant. The Faulkner precedent makes clear that wearing it is the violation. Remove it entirely.
4. Conclusion: for non-exempt riders, the only safe choice in UCI competition is to take the CGM off completely before the start.

The Faulkner case is why the 2026 "clarification" matters even though the underlying rule is old. It reminds the peloton that the UCI enforces this provision strictly, on the letter, and that a moment of inattention can cost a result that took years to earn.

Key takeaway: Faulkner lost a Strade Bianche podium for wearing a glucose sensor that, by her account, recorded nothing — proof the UCI penalises possession, not advantage. In UCI races, the device must come off entirely.

The bike-computer size cap — the 2028 rule people keep confusing with July

Now to the rule that's caused the most reader confusion, because it shares an article number with the glucose ban and arrived in the same press release, yet has nothing to do with 1 July 2026. From 1 January 2028, bike computers used in UCI competition will be capped at a maximum footprint of 126 mm × 71 mm, under an update to Article 1.3.006 bis on onboard technology. That's eighteen months after the pocket ban, and it's the single most-confused date in all the coverage.

The first thing to understand is that this rule bans nothing currently on sale. The 126 × 71 mm limit was set, quite deliberately, to the dimensions of the Wahoo Elemnt Ace, the largest mainstream head unit on the market at roughly 125 × 70 mm. That puts the biggest computer you can buy a single millimetre inside the cap. Every other popular unit sits comfortably under it. The rule isn't aimed at today's devices at all. It's a pre-emptive strike against future "smartphone-size" screens that don't yet exist.

So if you own, or your favourite rider uses, a Wahoo Ace, a Garmin Edge 1050 or a Hammerhead Karoo, none of them gets banned in 2028. The honest summary is that the UCI has drawn a line just above the current state of the art to stop the next escalation before it starts, rather than to outlaw anything in use now.

The rationale, once again, is cognitive load. In the UCI's words: "This decision was taken in light of the impact of on-board technologies on the cognitive load experienced by riders. Several studies have shown that the increasing volume of data available to riders during competition can contribute to an increased cognitive workload, a key factor in the occurrence of accidents." The theory is that a bigger screen invites more data, more data raises mental workload, and a distracted rider is a crash waiting to happen.

Checklist — is my (or my favourite rider's) head unit affected by the 2028 cap?

• [ ] Measure the device footprint. Under 126 × 71 mm? You're fine.
• [ ] Is it a current mainstream unit (Wahoo Ace, Garmin Edge series, Karoo)? All current models pass.
• [ ] Are you racing UCI events in 2028 or later? Only then does the cap apply at all.
• [ ] Amateur or non-UCI? The cap never applies to you.

Key takeaway: The 126 × 71 mm cap starts in 2028, not July 2026, and bans nothing on sale today — the largest unit, the Wahoo Ace, is 1 mm inside the limit by design.

Does the rule actually work? The cognitive-load debate

The UCI's safety case rests on a clean-sounding chain: bigger screen leads to more data leads to higher cognitive load leads to more crashes. It's intuitive, it's hard to argue with in a press release, and according to a growing chorus of analysts, it falls apart the moment you look at how riders actually use their devices. This is the critique the straight news recaps leave out, and you need it for a fair read of the package.

The sharpest objection comes from technical commentators like the5krunner and DC Rainmaker: screen size and data volume aren't the same thing. A 60 mm screen can display exactly as many data fields as a 70 mm one. You just make the numbers smaller or page between screens. The amount of information a rider takes on board is a function of software, how many fields are configured, how many alerts and notifications pop up, how aggressively the device interrupts with messages, sensor feeds and turn prompts. Cognitive load lives in the firmware, not in the millimetres of the bezel. Cap the hardware and a team just delivers the same data flood on a smaller screen.

There's also a candid admission buried in the UCI's own messaging. The federation conceded it will consult stakeholders "to gain a better understanding of how riders interact with the various data streams," which is a polite way of saying it's regulating first and studying the problem afterwards. Critics at road.cc made the point directly: the UCI hasn't produced a specific safety study showing that screen size causes crashes, only general references to cognitive-load research. And setting the limit at the exact dimensions of the current biggest device reinforces the impression that the number was reverse-engineered to look reasonable rather than derived from evidence.

A balanced scorecard on the cognitive-load case:

• In the UCI's favour: cognitive overload is a real, studied factor in accidents; a federation has a legitimate interest in capping a clear escalation path before screens genuinely do become phone-sized; the rule costs current teams nothing.
• Against the UCI: no published study links screen size specifically to crashes; size and data volume aren't the same thing; software (alerts, pop-ups, sensor streams) is the real driver of distraction and is untouched; the limit conspicuously matches the largest existing device; the UCI admits it still needs to study how riders use data.

The fairest verdict is that the size cap is a precautionary, low-cost rule that addresses the wrong variable. It pre-empts a hypothetical future problem (giant screens) while leaving the actual mechanism of data overload (software design) entirely unregulated. It won't make 2028 racing measurably safer. But it doesn't harm anyone either, which may be exactly why it passed.

Key takeaway: The size cap targets hardware while distraction lives in software, and the UCI concedes it lacks a specific study — making the rule a harmless-but-unconvincing fix rather than a genuine safety breakthrough.

How this affects the 2026 Tour de France and the wider rules package

The timing of the pocket ban is no accident, and it makes the 2026 Tour de France the first proving ground. The ban takes effect 1 July 2026, the 2026 Tour de France runs 4–26 July, so the rule is live from the very opening stage. Every rider has to line up with rear-only pockets (plus the permitted radio pocket) from the Grand Départ onward. If a team tries the front-pocket fairing trick at the Tour, it's an immediate compliance problem under a brand-new, purpose-built rule, and given the Van Schip precedent, the commissaires have already shown they'll act.

The pocket ban doesn't arrive alone, either. It's part of a broader 1 July 2026 regulation package out of the Desenzano del Garda meeting, and a few of the other changes are worth knowing:

• A tougher sanctions table. The revised penalties for non-compliant equipment and rider-worn accessories are explicitly designed to "strengthen its deterrent effect and ensure a more systematic application of consistent sanctions." Expect violations to be punished more predictably and more visibly.
• The yellow card system expands. From 1 January 2027, the yellow-card misconduct system extends to Elite Class 1 events, a wider net for dangerous riding, irregular behaviour and equipment breaches.
• Longer sprint finishes. A new rule requires that finishing straights for expected bunch sprints be "as long as possible, at least 200 metres," a genuine safety measure aimed at reducing the chaos of cramped, technical sprint finales.
• A calendar reshuffle. Both the men's and women's Vuelta move into September to make room for the 2027 Road World Championships in Haute-Savoie Mont-Blanc, with the Tour de France Femmes starting a day earlier.

For the fan watching the Tour, the practical effect is subtle but real. You won't see riders with oddly sculpted, bulging torsos any more. The front-pocket fairing era ends on stage 1. On-screen data will look unchanged, because the metabolic-data rule is old news and power and heart rate remain. And the longer sprint straights may, over three weeks, make the dangerous final kilometres slightly less frantic.

Decision guide — "does this rule touch me?" in one pass:

1. Do you race UCI-sanctioned events? If no, none of these rules apply. Stop here.
2. Wearing a front-pocket jersey? Move pockets to the rear (radio pocket excepted) before 1 July 2026.
3. Using a CGM or lactate sensor? Remove it for any UCI race. It's been illegal since 2021.
4. Worried about your bike computer? Check the footprint against 126 × 71 mm, but only from 2028, and current units all pass.

Key takeaway: The 2026 Tour de France is the first Grand Tour raced entirely under the pocket ban, alongside tougher sanctions, longer sprint straights and a Vuelta calendar shift — a coordinated safety-and-fairness package, not a single quirky rule.

Frequently asked questions

Q: Does the UCI jersey pocket ban apply to amateur cyclists and sportives? A: No. The ban applies only to UCI-sanctioned competition, meaning WorldTour, ProSeries, Class 1 and similar races. Amateur sportives, gran fondos and non-sanctioned group rides are completely unaffected, so you can keep wearing any jersey you like on your club run.

Q: Can pro riders still see power and heart rate on their bike computers? A: Yes. Power and heart rate are both fully legal and stay on screen in UCI races. Only live glucose and lactate readings are banned. Body temperature, sweat rate, breathing, navigation and all standard metrics are also permitted.

Q: Will my Wahoo Elemnt Ace, Garmin Edge 1050 or Hammerhead Karoo be banned? A: No. All three sit inside the 126 × 71 mm size cap. The Wahoo Ace (≈125 × 70 mm) is 1 mm under the limit, and the Garmin Edge 1050 (≈119 × 60 mm) and Hammerhead Karoo (≈102.8 × 61.66 mm) are well under. No head unit on sale today is banned, and the cap only applies in UCI competition anyway.

Q: When does the bike-computer size limit start — 2026 or 2028? A: 2028. The 126 × 71 mm cap takes effect 1 January 2028, eighteen months after the 1 July 2026 pocket ban. The two get confused because they were announced together, but they have different start dates.

Q: Why does the UCI ban glucose and lactate monitors in races? A: The ban dates to 2021 under Article 1.3.006 bis, on the stated grounds that "there is no evidence proving that it could improve the safety of the non-diabetic riders." The UCI is the only professional sports governing body that bans continuous glucose monitors in competition; they stay legal in training and in triathlon.

Q: Can you still put a radio on the front of your jersey? A: Yes. A pocket "intended solely to hold a radio communication device" is the one permitted exception to the front-pocket ban. Any other front pocket, for nutrition or anything else, is prohibited from 1 July 2026.

Q: Do these rules affect the 2026 Tour de France? A: Yes. The pocket ban is live from 1 July 2026, and the Tour runs 4–26 July 2026, so every rider races under the rear-only pocket rule from stage 1. The glucose/lactate display rule (old) and the longer-sprint-straight rule also apply.

Q: What is Article 1.3.006 bis, and why does it keep coming up? A: It's the UCI's onboard-technology rule. It originally introduced the 2021 ban on devices capturing metabolic values like glucose and lactate, and the UCI has since bolted the 2028 bike-computer size cap onto the same article, which is why one rule number covers two very different provisions.

The bottom line

Strip away the muddled headlines and the picture is clear. One genuinely new thing happens on 1 July 2026: front jersey pockets are banned (rear-only, with a radio exception), backed by a tougher sanctions table, aimed squarely at the hidden aero "fairing" trick of stuffing jerseys to reshape the body. The glucose and lactate display ban is old, dating to 2021 under Article 1.3.006 bis, and power and heart rate were never in danger. The bike-computer size cap is a 2028 rule that bans nothing on sale today.

For the engaged race fan, the takeaways are practical. Your favourite riders' on-screen data will look unchanged, the era of sculpted-torso aero hacks ends at the 2026 Tour, and the much-feared "big computer ban" is a distant, toothless cap that the largest device on the market already passes by a single millimetre. The UCI's safety logic is genuine but uneven: convincing on fairness, shakier on whether capping screen size does anything for cognitive load when distraction really lives in software.

If you race UCI events, act on the one rule that bites now. Move your pockets to the rear before 1 July, and keep any glucose or lactate sensor strictly for training. Everyone else can watch the 2026 Tour, enjoy a peloton of normally-shaped torsos, and file the rest under "rules the UCI made because it could."

Draft Metadata

• Word Count: ~3,500
• Reading Time: ~15 minutes
• Primary Keyword: UCI jersey pocket ban 2026 (used naturally throughout)
• Secondary Keywords: UCI data display rule, UCI 2026 mid-season rules, glucose lactate ban cycling, cycling computer rules UCI, UCI front pocket ban July 2026, UCI bike computer size limit 126x71mm, Article 1.3.006 bis, continuous glucose monitor cycling ban, UCI rules Tour de France 2026
• H2 Count: 11
• Tables: 4 (rule/date summary, allowed vs banned data, head-unit size comparison embedded; plus framework lists)
• Decision Frameworks / Checklists: 5 (jersey legality checklist, metabolic-sensor decision framework, 2028 head-unit checklist, "does this touch me" decision guide, cognitive-load scorecard)
• Image Placeholders: 7 (no cover/hero — handled separately)

Notes for Editor

• All numbers, dates, rule numbers and quotes trace to research/facts.md. Key fact-check anchors: 1 July 2026 pocket ban; 126 × 71 mm / 1 Jan 2028 cap; 2021 origin of 1.3.006 bis; Faulkner 2023 Strade Bianche DQ; Van Schip Ronde de l'Oise DQ (June 2026); Tour de France 4–26 July 2026.
• The 126 × 71 mm vs Wahoo Ace 125 × 70 mm "1 mm inside" framing is from the research and is load-bearing for the "nothing is banned" point — keep precise.
• Consider linking the head-unit table to any existing Wahoo Ace / Garmin Edge 1050 reviews on site.

Next Steps

• [ ] Send to humanizer for AI pattern removal
• [ ] Collect/generate the 7 images (favour diagrams/infographics per placeholders)
• [ ] Add internal links (Tour de France 2026, bike-computer reviews)
• [ ] Final SEO review