Compal-Merida is history and in comes a new well known sponsor, ready to take the team to the next level. The long term goal is to reach Pro Tour for the first time in history. The ultimate season goal is to set a new record with finishing top 15 in the PCT Ranking.
The team will no longer focus on asian riders and the squad will be put together with mainly europeans and potentially riders from the western hemisphere. Many riders have not been resigned and so this will be quite a large transfer window for Team Europcar.
Our main goal and only hope this season is to survive the PCT-division for our first time in history. Hopefully we'll manage that with a more experience core than ever.
Nice sprint train you have for Lo Cicero, and they are decent flat riders as well. So you should be able to get plenty of points from bunch sprints. Your mountain squad has a good depth, but no superstar, so will probably be hard to get victories from there. Depth points should however be possible.
Don't know how Zaini did on the hills in the past; he may be a bit disadvantaged by his relatively low Acc compared to some other guys in PCT. But there's good support for him, I guess.
And you probably know yourself that your TT and cobbles are... let's say: below PCT average. So in my opinion, it could be quite a tough season. But if your mountain and hill squads perform well, you should be able to stay up.
And the jersey is great, as are lots of others. Great job by all the designers!
So very very dissapointed I missed out on Calmejane. Have fun with him, he's awesome
24/02/21 - kandesbunzler said “I don't drink famous people."
15/08/22 - SotD said "Your [jandal's] humour is overrated"
11/06/24 - knockout said "Winning is fine I guess. Truth be told this felt completely unimportant." [ICL] Santos-Euskadi | [PT] Xero Racing
Fabianski wrote:
And you probably know yourself that your TT and cobbles are... let's say: below PCT average.
Hehe, perfecly aware of that, so we'll only race the mandatory (PT)HC-races with cobbles, and trying to avoid stage races where TT have too much of an impact.
Thank you for your in-debt analysis, I do agree with you on all of your points. We're totally dependent on Lo Cicero to score big this season and to make some surprises in the mountains.
Jandal7 wrote: So very very dissapointed I missed out on Calmejane. Have fun with him, he's awesome!
Yeah, that was a hard fought transfer battle He was actually our main target this season, mostly because of his nationality and not that bad age, but also because there are some races that we hope could suit him perfectly. We'll see