What suprised me most was how long it was, how much time it took to actually come though and the speeds at which they were driving.
Its nothing like a parade - they leave an hour and a half before the cyclists and have to arrive at the destination with the same time gap so there is no lollygagging.
There are about 34 sponsors represented in the caravan, each one seems to have 5-10 cars and at different intevals there are race officials, team cards, police and gendarme
Many of the sponsor vehicles have people on top throwing stuff out to the crowds. As the caravan was poised to come through Briancon I decided we would watch it from a side street just before they make the turn up the big hill where tons of people are already camped out waiting for the cyclists and caravan to come through. At this location there were hardly any people so my kids had a field day scoring prizes.
After I returned I was talking with my boss at work who is French and was telling me a funny story about this years tour I had not heard about. Apparently the caravan was given instructions not to throw out prizes at certain sections of the course - mainly on mountain passes in the national parks as it creates a mess of litter to clean up or just gets blown off the road into the parks. Obviously they want to minimize the footprint of the caravan so the instructions make sense. Well, when the caravan comes through some of these areas there are hundreds or thousands of fans waiting for their goodies and when they don't get any they are pissed. Apparently they start throwing bottles and stuff at the caravans and even attacking them (easier to do in the mountains where everything is slow speed) for their prizes (crap like packs of candies, clappers, foam hands, stickers, magnets, coupons etc...)
Funny story that went into a discussion of him trying to compare cycling fans in Europe with their North American counterparts. He ended up choosing NASCAR fans as the equivalent.
Some pics of the caravan:
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