Ollfardh wrote:
Well, is there anyone you won't mind losing?

beagle wrote:
We would like welcome Welle Jallays in our team, as we want to have both W(J)allays twins riding alongside. We will make an offer once transfer period start.

Ollfardh wrote:
Didn't even spot the weird name, how did that happen?

Team BPost – Vlaanderen have been busy so far in the transfer season, with almost minute-by-minute action for the previous 48 hours. Originally we were targeting Jan Bakelants but his signature proved to cost more than we were ever willing to spend on one rider. In our two year history we have always preferred to have multiple leaders on our team rather than just one person for whom our team is working.

We can, however, now reveal two confirmed signatures for next season. First up we have the young Belgian Victor Campenaerts. Campenaerts is a great young time trialist who will no doubt grow with our team and form part of a formidable TTT set-up this season. At the moment it looks like he will be spending the season on loan at Oz Cycling Project, where he will no doubt learn from many of the world’s best time trialists. Campenaerts is on the minimum wage of €50,000 this season but no doubt he will prove to us soon enough why he deserves to earn much more than that. Some are already hailing him as the next Dominique Cornu.

Our second signing is a name that will be familiar to many more people. William Bonnet is a versatile French rider who is well-suited to many terrains of interest to us. He is most notably a time-trialist, and he will form part of the TTT squad we are trying to put together this season. Not only that but he is a fantastic lead-out rider for whoever turns out to be our lead sprinter next season. Finally, he has some proficiency over cobbled terrain and may well be of help in that part of the season. We have signed Bonnet on a contract worth €120,000, which we feel is a fair price.

We can confirm three more signings this morning, and we believe that at least two of these will be absolutely key to our team this season.

Our first big name is Jurgen Van den Broeck, the best Belgian stage racer at the moment. This makes him the ideal mentor for our young Tim Wellens. We are confident that Van den Broeck can provide us with many points and quite a few good results. We are unsure whether or not he will be riding a GT this season, but even if he doesn't we know that he is ideal for shorter stage races. In excahnge for him we will say farewell for Tim Declerq, one of our young classics specialists, who will remain in the PCT with Team Puma - SAP.

Our second signing is a Dutchman - Robin van der Hugenhaben. He is one of the most versatile puncheurs in professional cycling, as he is also a fantastic climber. He will be our leader in the Ardennes classics this year and he will also undoubtedly be taking on some week-long stage races, as he is certainly capable of results in those.

Finally we have secured the signature of Kristof Vandewalle from Project 1t4i. We did a straight swap for him in exchange for Remco Breors, who has ridden with us for 2 seasons now but relishes the opportunity of riding for the premier Dutch team in cycling. Vandewalle will join yesterday's signing of Bonnet in our new TTT setup.

We have held off announcing our goals so far this season, to keep some suspense and also to stop people knowing roughly how much money we had to spend in transfers. However, with the transfer season nearly over we can announce our goals:

Top Ten Team Standings

We hope that with the very well rounded team that we have we might be able to sneak into the top 10. We have a leader for every terrain (we will have our team presentation shortly) and so should be able to ensure a steady stream of points.

Win - Ronde Van Vlaanderen

This was always going to be our biggest goal of the season - with our promotion to the highest level we are able to throw everything into this race. Vanspeybrouck will be there to fly the Belgian flag and try to bring in a result in front of our home crowd.

Win - Paris-Roubaix

We are a team who is well known for our ability on cobbled terrain and once again we believe that Vanspeybrouck can make a competitive effort to come close to a win in the other cobbled monument of the season.

Win - Omloop Het Nieuwsblad

While not as prestigious as the previous two we really want to come out of this season with a cobbled classic win - we have not won a Belgian classic in our previous two seasons. This seems like a great time to start.

Stage Win - Giro d'Italia

While Van Den Broeck is a solid rider on most terrains we are not sure about his ability to sustain a high GC placing over three weeks. Because of that we have decided that simply targeting a stage win will be a better way to start off our first ever Grand Tour.

roturn wrote:
Very ambitious goal in the first PT season.
In especially when not having Bewley, Boonen, Cancellara, Burghardt.

But I guess Vanspeybrouck should instantly be one of the top cobblers.

Alakagom wrote:
You didn't have much luck until this point in the season at all, a great shame since the team on paper looks solid to me. Still not is lost, goals maybe missed, but relegation can still be stopped. And this can already begin if Zingle can hold that KoM for longer and Stauff be consistent at Vuelta.

SotD wrote:
while Maxime Daniel will be a pretty handy helper.

cio93 wrote:

I reserve my right to keep Daniel next season as he is my rider, okay?! You can't keep Demare either!

And I don't think Stallaert will go down in wage enough to be worth mentioning, he got some results already and 150k for 77cob 79 spr is where I'd usually expect the formulas to end up, or let's say I'm still surprised by Kluge @105k.

Aside from those small points, I agree and I still hope VDB gets a stage race podium or two after his GT attempt was so-so.
I don't want to see you down anyway as I don't want to fight against you to promote next season, and Daniel appreciates every good cobbler staying in PT

With the season well advanced and not much glory to write home about we are pleased to say that stage 4 of the Tour de Suisse has given us a huge boost. The stage was a 16.8km team time trial around Laussane and we had brought almost our best possible team time trial train.



At the start of the season we really wanted to excel in this discipline and we are pleased to say that it really paid off today. Before today one of our only other podium places came from the Paris-Nice team time trial so we went in knowing that we had a good shot at winning. We were a bit nervous going out first on this course just in case weather conditions changed.



However, it didn't matter because the time of 22'14" stood all day, giving us the win by 7 seconds over Tinkoff Credit Systems Bank! We sent Jurgen Van den Broeck up on stage to accept the stage winner's award.



We now look forward to the very first stage of the Tour de France which is another team time trial. We will have almost the same lineup there but this time Dominique Cornu, one of our star riders and Belgium time trial champion, will be joining us too. Hopefully we can turn this into success.