Pinarello-Q36.5 Confirm Roubaix Squad: Stewart Handed Battlefield Leadership as Pidcock Officially Ruled Out of the Hell of the North
Pinarello-Q36.5 have confirmed the seven riders who will line up for the 123rd Paris-Roubaix on Sunday, with British sprinter Jake Stewart granted a battlefield promotion to designated leader after the team finally and officially ruled out Tom Pidcock on Wednesday morning. The full squad reads: Stewart, Damiano Caruso, Filippo Conca, Matteo Moschetti, Mattia Bais, Eric Antonio Cepeda and 22-year-old Norwegian neo-pro Petter Strand — the first ever Q36.5 line-up at the Hell of the North that does not feature Pidcock.
The Pidcock decision had been telegraphed all week. In the team's third update on the 26-year-old Briton's Volta a Catalunya knee injury in five days, sports director Jens Zemke confirmed on Wednesday morning what the rider himself had already conceded privately on Tuesday: there is simply no way the medial collateral ligament damage Pidcock sustained in his stage four crash in Catalunya can be fit enough for the cobbles in time for Sunday. "We have done everything possible," Zemke said. "Tom has done everything possible. The honest truth is that the calendar will not bend for an MCL injury, and we will not start a rider at Paris-Roubaix who is not 100 per cent ready to be safe on the cobbles. Our focus is now entirely on getting him to Liège."
That decision turns the entire shape of Pinarello-Q36.5's spring on its head. The team's 2026 season was built almost exclusively around Pidcock's Monument bid — a programme of dedicated cobbles training, a custom Pinarello Dogma F Roubaix prototype with bespoke compliance figures, and a six-rider support unit personally curated around the Briton's needs. With Pidcock now removed from the equation, that infrastructure is being repurposed in real time around 25-year-old Stewart, who has spent the spring quietly assembling the most consistent results of his career. Top-twenties at E3 and Dwars door Vlaanderen, a fifth-place finish at Scheldeprijs on Wednesday and an unmistakably increased role inside the team have left him as the only rider on the Q36.5 start sheet with a credible velodrome closing speed.
"This is a chance Jake has earned," Zemke said. "I am not going to pretend the leadership lands the way Tom's would have. But Jake is in better shape than at any point in his career and the team will line up to give him every opportunity in the finale. He is a fast finisher who can survive the cobbles, and at this Roubaix — with the dry forecast and the front group expected to be larger than usual — that is exactly the profile we want." Stewart himself struck a notably modest tone on Wednesday: "I am not Tom Pidcock and I am not going to ride this race like I am Tom Pidcock. I am going to ride it like I have ridden every Classic this spring — survive, save my legs, and back myself in the closing twenty kilometres."
The most important name on the supporting cast is Caruso. The 38-year-old Italian veteran — recruited by the team in the winter explicitly to be Pidcock's road captain — will instead have to play exactly the same role for Stewart, and his cobbled experience is the only thing on the start sheet that comes close to the institutional knowledge Pidcock would have brought. "Damiano was supposed to be Tom's right hand," Zemke admitted. "Now he is Jake's right hand. The work is the same. The rider on his wheel is the difference." Caruso, who has finished Roubaix five times in his career and was 27th here in 2024, will pilot Stewart through the chaos of the first ten sectors and then sacrifice himself before the Trouée d'Arenberg.
Conca, Moschetti and Bais make up the experienced Italian core; Cepeda, the 24-year-old Ecuadorian who has spent the entire spring shadowing Pidcock through the cobbled Classics in the role of quasi-apprentice, gets the chance to ride the race he has been preparing for in his mentor's place; and Strand, the 22-year-old Norwegian neo-pro, earns a fairy-tale Monument debut after a winter of cobbled training rides under Caruso's direct supervision. "Petter has done every single specific cobbled session Tom has done since January," Zemke said. "He is the youngest rider on this start sheet but he is also one of the best prepared. We have absolute confidence in him."
For Pinarello-Q36.5, Sunday is now an exercise in damage limitation rather than ambition — but it is also, in a strange way, an audition. With Pidcock's contract running into its final year and rumours from December persisting that the Briton may seek a return to a WorldTour squad in 2027, the team is acutely aware that it cannot afford to be defined entirely by one rider. Stewart's promotion this week is the first concrete sign that Pinarello-Q36.5 are starting to think about a future beyond Pidcock, and a strong ride in the Roubaix velodrome on Sunday would be the loudest possible statement of intent. As Zemke himself put it before the squad presentation closed: "Tom will come back. But this team is bigger than one rider, and Sunday is the day we start proving that."