The team had much better Qatars but also had much worse.
5th in GC is exactly what his favourite position was, so it's about expected position for him really.
Was hoping to get a bit more stage results closer to the win as it looked like he could have done so but was blocked then a bit. Anyway consistent sprints from his is most important to see.
Thanks for the reports and congrats to nemolito for that performance here.
A really poor race for us. Larsen especially not delivering as we hoped. It's somewhat comforting that a good GC was out of reach anyway due to the split on stage 5.
Good to see SKA still delivering in his new team, we will always cheer for him! Congrats to Nemo on the win with Manninen and thanks for all the reports
Not a good race for Evonik but that was to be expected. Pszscolarski was like 2s off from a valuable secondary result in the epilog but can't blame him on not winning the lottery ticket lol
Hope we are more aggressive in further races without a good leader when KoM points are on offer / stage wins look more likely.
Also another year without echelons playing a proper role in Qatar. rip.
Silvestre with a pretty disappointing race save for that one second place on the last sprint stage. Good thing we didn't come here for points. I wonder if having Madrazo here somehow messed with how the game calculated Silvestre's status. Perhaps something to consider future planning.
Very happy for LPH and Manninen to get such an amazing start to the season. If they can survive, this is how to do it.
Thanks for the reports, and congrats to Nemo/Manninen on taking the title.
After a disappointing 10th on the opening day for Ewan, was not looking good, so to come away with 2 stage victories out of the remaining 4 sprint opportunities was a welcome turnaround on his debut for ISA - Hexacta. That was enough to secure him 2nd on GC and points competition which we're happy to take away from this outing.
In general looked like the team was performing well in terms of assisting with controlling the BotD and setting-up of the sprint train. A couple of fails on stage 1 and 5 in particular demonstrate that there is still quite a lot of luck involved with the sprint AI - just see Grosu for the full proof of that (unlucky for Huski)! Got a nice roll of the dice on the last day with Baskra's very unexpected 2nd in the epilogue also delivering an unexpected points scoring GC spot for him. So a good points haul here at what is a key race for us, so some relief after a poor show in Tasmania.
Very unfortunate that Leung got dropped in the last flat stage. This time he did well in the epilogue and even got some bonus seconds earlier.
On the other hand I'm happy with Hsu's performance in the sprints. Much better than last year!
Thanks for the detailed reports Ulrich Ulriksen. The 3rd place of Artem Samolenkov on stage 3 was nice, but the fact that my whole squad was in the circuit split during stage 5 totally destroyed the race for us.
