<p>If we break an instant runoff voting (IRV) election into stages or rounds by tallying votes, identifying the plurality winner, eliminating the candidate with the fewest votes and redistributing their votes, then repeating this process, we obtain a series of plurality winners (i.e. so-called transient winners), one for each stage. This process models the situation that arises in several real-life scenarios such as the Tour de France cycling race and in some political leadership contests. But how many different transient winners could be obtained in this way? Here we explore upper bounds for the number of different transient winners that could be obtained in single peaked models of IRV elections, and show that these bounds can be met. Through simulation we demonstrate that the number of possible profiles that meet the bound is likely very small.</p>