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.