Remco Evenepoel made an ideal debut for Red Bull-Bora-hansgrohe together with the new German cycling hopeful Florian Lipowitz. The German team achieved their first victory of the season in the team time trial of the Mallorca Challenge.
At 3:32 p.m. the Bora team and their new star from Belgium set out on the largely flat 23.8 kilometer course. And the team worked right away. In the last kilometers with a headwind you could see Evenepoel in the time trial world champion’s jersey and Lipowitz in the lead. Together with Nico Denz and Maxim van Gils, they raced to the finish as a quartet – the average speed was 59.4 km/h. The fourth driver at the finish was decisive for the ranking. There you could see the joy on the smiling faces about the first win of the season.
Lipowitz: “Did really well as a team”
“Starting the season with a win is of course super cool. I think it’s a great success for the team.”says Lipowitz in an interview with Sportschau. “We drove really well as a team, the changes worked well”the 27-year-old continued.
The Movistar team took second place (+4 seconds), the Jayco-AlUla team with the Germans Jasha Sütterlin and Felix Engelhardt came third (+17 seconds). The UAE team was at the start without Tadej Pogacar but with Nils Politt, Pavel Sivakov and Marc Soler and had to be content with fourth place (+19 seconds).
An unusual number of top teams at the start
What was unusual at the Trofeo Session Salines was the strong presence of the top teams in a small 3rd category race. Eight WorldTour teams alone took part. There were reasons for this: For the teams, the race was an important test for the largest cycling race in the world in July, as the Tour de France will feature a team time trial for the first time since 2019.
At the start of the tour in Barcelona, the first yellow jersey will be awarded in the team time trial. And for class riders like Evenepoel and Lipowitz it is also important not to waste any seconds.
Remco Evenepoel during the warm-up in Mallorca
Just one more team time trial before the Tour
Team time trials are also demanding. For the professionals, it’s not as rhythmic as an individual time trial. When in the lead, the drivers each have to deliver a very high level of performance; in the slipstream, it is then important to bring their heart rate down quickly and recover. Everything has to be coordinated, so many teams apparently wanted to take advantage of the early opportunity to test under competitive conditions. Before the Tour of France, there is now only a team time trial on the Paris-Nice Tour.
Also on Mallorca was REMBE | rad-net also has a second German team. The team from Sauerland was the first team to roll off the starting ramp and ended up in 17th place (+2:06 minutes). A total of 21 teams took part. The team time trial is part of the five-day series of one-day races on the Balearic island.
