First with Van Vleuten calling the support car but not using it (I still don't know why)
I was curious about this too, and I searched extensive for the answer but could not find it.
Also because a Dutch reporter did not do his job well, because in a 4 minutes interview with van Vleuten after the race,
half of the interview was about the final climb and the Dutch reporter did not ask about it.
Weird, because his live-reporter-colleagues were speculating a lot about this issue during the race,
and were wondering too why van Vleuten seemed desperately to ask for her support car.
So, even after my search with the advantage that I understand Dutch, I still don't know why because nobody asked van Vleuten.
During the race, the main speculation was that it seemed that van Vleuten was not happy with the tire pressure,
what would explain her once jumping up and down a bit with one tire, and it looked like that she wanted a bike change.
But due to the increasing pace of Vollering, it was not a good moment to do that. According to the speculating live reporters.
In my opinion what is also speculation ; if she really had tire pressure issue,
she could and would have changed her bike in a later phase of the race, for example when she was isolated.
I guess that she was very nervous and was trying to find causes why her legs did not feel like yesterday,
and the reason, in just my opinion, was that she was had no superlegs anymore due to the big effort in previous stage.
Maybe she needed the support car to reassure/comfort her that her tire pressure was fine, and that she had simply no super legs.
But just like you, ophiuko, I still don't know why and there could be a number of explanations to this mystery.
She did mention in the interview that she was very nervous when the climb started
what would be an excellent opportunity for the interviewer to ask her about this issue, but he did not ask, what is pretty stupid.
We should have known why the Vuelta winner called the support car in the last climb that even was decisive for GC victory.
Instead, we have a mystery now = very weird. Hopefully the media do a much better job in the other women's tours of this season.
