We finished third last year, have seemingly improved a tiny bit so a top 5 team standings goal looks reasonable.

Seven consecutive top 10 finishes, can we make it eight? Lopez is one of the top favourites, achieving at least a top 10 is expected...

Big mountains, big money line-up. It's the first time ever that Lopez and Lecuisinier will team up and they get additional support from Eenkhoorn, Blums and Polanc. Going into the race with a top favourite and outstanding support, a failure to achieve the podium goal would be extremely disappointing.

Win Goals are always somewhat risky but going into it as the previous winner and arguably the top favourite with multiple potentially deciding stages is the most comfortable way to do it.

You knew it would be here again.

AbhishekLFC wrote:

All of those goals look achievable with only the Liechtenstein one a possibility to miss out on, given it's a classic and weird stuff happens sometimes. Looking good for some big money for next time!

We keep the same main jersey for yet another season.

We are extremely proud to have a couple of riders winning the national championship races of their countries. So we'll see a few more colorful jerseys this year.

Crediting the jersey makers is a bit complicated than for most other teams: The original design was made by aidanvn, the_hoyle updated it with new secondary sponsors for us at some point, Ezeefreak made the French NC a couple years ago and some Latvian pre-kindergarten kid used a color bucket to randomly color the remaining NC jerseys:

Ulrich Ulriksen wrote:

Ezee's original design is so classy that the pre-kindergarten kid couldn't really mess up, especially since he seem to be pretty good at randomly picking great combinations.

Two Top 10 results in 9 attempts (Twice 6th place with Lecuisinier / Taaramäe) makes this one of the races where we have historically little success and unlike other races with even worse performances, we often came here with at least some ambitions. Last year Tobias Foss finished 19th while Miguel Angel Lopez opened his season with a 90th place in GC.

This year we have focussed on the stage racers with Foss and Plapp as our expected leadership duo. Hopefully they get a bit lucky with the gaps on the 2nd stage.

No top sprinter, no exceptional prologue specialists, hard to see a way to score big here. In a perfect worlds we get lucky with some echelons causing gaps but it became rare that those happen in recent years and even if so, we might not be the obvious team to benefit from them.

The hope is on the rouleurs to get some minor points or ideally go for the late attacks. No big expectations.

It's a race to the bottom. The early schedule is not in our favor, expect us to be near the relegation spots at the end of January even with the additional PTHC classic.

Tour of Tasmania
Stage Scoring

8th	Stage 1	Nihal Silva	2 Pts
GC / Jerseys
21.	GC	Tobias Foss	28 Pts
44.	GC	Jan Polanc	10 Pts

Tour of Qatar

Stage Scoring
-
GC / Jerseys
47.	GC	Morne Van Niekerk	10 Pts

Great Ocean Road Classic

29.	Nihal Silva	5 Pts
33.	Fredrik Dversnes	2 Pts
44.	Kristers Ansons	2 Pts

The scoring speaks for itself: Expectations were basically non-existant and we still failed to meet them. This start was about as bad as possible.

Luke Plapp and Pascal Eenkhoorn will share leadership here in a race that should suit Lukes skill set fairly well. Our hope is that we can fight for placements in the top 15 to top 20 area and be competitive in the youth classification. With quite a few bumps in the sprint finals, this is an obvious rce for Jaume Sureda.

5x Finishing Outside the Top 20 (out of at most 24 teams)
2x DNF / DNS
14th last year

Somehow, we ended up with a solid team for this race. A top half finish looks within reach?! We are basically sending our best team outside of Lecuisinier (for obvious reason) with the sole exception of Jan Polanc replacing Plapp so that he can race in Portugal.

Sorry jandal, i have to throw the towel on this one, you win this time!

Another opportunity for Plapp to lead us. As this is a hilly stage race, expectations are not the biggest, but if the hilly finishes are raced fairly passive, we see a chance for him to get a decent GC result with his good TT skills. Silva is here for the sprints.

Sending a 7-men lineup to a race containing a TTT is a huge disadvantage but with Lecuisinier not ready to open his season yet, we had no choice if we wanted to attend all triple header races. Foss is our leader here, Sureda our sprinter and the rest of the lineup is filled up with whoever can TT decently and didnt have too many race day concerns.

As every year, Lopez is here to lead us. He only has five helpers by his side, but with names like Blums, Eenkhoorn or Polanc, it hopefully is still solid.

We are lacking a great option for this race as we have decided to not send Lopez here. Instead we are relying on our rouleur group around Kurianov and are also sending Martins Blums as a good puncheur along with them. Hard to have high expectations but we have at least some options who could be interesting to watch.

Starting the month in last place, this also is not looking to be particularly great. At least we have the first favourable classic for Lopez but we are still waiting for the first Lecuisinier sighting as well as the first cobbles for Polanc. This isnt an unimportant month since we need to start collecting depth points but it wouldnt be all too shocking to be in the relegation zone at the end of the month.

Fabianski - The passivity is really the most annoying part of the season so far. I had to expect a slow start but I've had so few breakaway appearances that we didnt give ourself a chance to surprise. Unfortunately, February isnt looking much better in that regard

redordead - The start has made it more difficult than it already was. We really need some big scores soon if we want to have a shot.

Nemo -Seems like Plapp at least contributes in Tirreno and showering was nice. But i'm promising you that it will become more difficult to evade my leaders in the rest of the seson

The quintessential punchy sprinter race is always an intriguing one. We finished runner-up twice with Michael Van Stayen in the past but now we want to see the puncheurs come up on top with last year's 15th place finisher Miguel Angel Lopez as our leader.

It's time for Lecuisinier to start his season. Colombia is a pure mountain race that can attract some of the very best climbers so we are expecting some strong competition. Nevertheless, this is our first win goal of the season!

You will be hard-pressed to find a team that has such a historically bad run of results in a single race as we had in Czechia: In eight years of having to attend, we finished in the top 50 GC positions exactly once: A 9th place by Rein Taaramäe in 2021. The lowlight was in 2020 when Yannick Stoltz was our best placed finisher in 146th position. This year, Morne Van Niekerk is looking to at least slightly improve upon most of our past performances.

Five cobbled races, five times the exact same lineup. Jan Polanc as the big leader, Krists Neilands as his co-leader or most important domestique depending on the race and situation. Then a bunch of strong rouleurs who are all knows as solid cobblers to help out. No need to pretend complicated thoughts as these were arguably the easiest planning decisions we had.

This is the part of the season where Jan Polanc really excelled last season including the monumental victory in Flanders. If we want to repeat or improve from last years scoring, we need to pull out some big points in these races once again.

March is where our rise up the ranking has to start. Lecuisiniers longest non-GT race of the year, plenty of great opportunities for Polanc and Lopez is in action too. If we are still stuck in the relegation zone after this race, we are destined to fail our goals for the season.

Sorry jandal, i have to throw the towel on this one, you win this time!

jandal7 wrote:


The future is now