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news
Fernando Alonso (CC licensed by Ryan Bayona)Fernando Alonso to launch team at 2014 Tour de France
Despite failing to buy the team licence of the Euskaltel-Euskadi squad, Formula One driver and cycling nut Fernando Alonso is pressing on with plans for his own team, which will be launched at the 2014 Tour de France.
Alonso’s manager, Luis Garcia Abad, has told Italian sportspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport that plans for Team Alonso are well underway.
“Some agreements with sponsors are already signed,” he said, and the team would be launched at “the first rest day of the next Tour [de France]”.
“Fernando has said he wants to bring the best of formula one to cycling, and vice versa,” Abad said. “This means technology, research, marketing, promotion, new tools such as telemetry, a medical centre.
“The intention is to do something new and avoid the problem of doping.”
Alberto Contador, Ivan Basso and Filippo Pozzato have all been tipped as possible members of Team Alonso, but Abad attempted to squash such rumours, saying: “At the moment, we can’t sign any contracts with riders.”
He also denied long-standing rumours that Alonso’s sponsor Santander would come in as title sponsor of the new squad. “It’s better to keep the business of F1 and cycling separate,” he said.
“We’re not talking about any companies currently involved in cycling. We’re turning to companies who are interested in innovation and with an ecological soul.”
Fernando Alonso’s preliminary agreement to buy out Euskaltel-Euskadi’s WorldTour licence collapsed late last month due to fundamental differences between the Formula 1 star and the team’s management on a range of issues.
Alsonso had been hailed as the team’s saviour when it was announced that he planned to buy out its WorldTour contract from its management company Basque Pro Cycling Team, as well as taking on 14 of its riders, including Samuel Sanchez.
That preliminary agreement, announced on 2 September, reportedly envisaged Alonso paying €2 million a year for the licence for the next three seasons.
However, Basque Pro Cycling insisted that Alonso retain team staff including management; honour contracts with bike supplier Orbea and clothing firm Bioracer; and apparently expressed a strong preference for the team to remain based in the Basque Country and not move to the Asturias region.
Instead of accepting Alonso’s rescue deal, the team instead elected to execute an "orderly shutdown" and close down at the end of the season.
John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.
He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.
Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.
John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.
He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.
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Wants to bring F1 technology to cycling?
Will have to work hard at overcoming UCI attitudes to technological change first.
Cool, their bikes will have KERS system: Charged downhill and released uphill with the Turbo button!
(EPO is sooo last century!) And with this system no one will care for disk breaks no more.
Most likely their bikes will be a Colnago/Ferrari collaboration, jerseys can already be found on Amazön
Combine this technique with Germans like Greipel, Kittel&Degenkolb and smoke the competition!
So enough gossip, I need to get back to work on my solar energy recovery system for the DI2 shifting.
Why launch a team mid-way through a season?
He wants the team to start racing in the 2015 season. So this will be all the hype and build up.
bikeboy you won't believe this, we agree on something!!
Nooooo. I am talking about carbon mitigation through technological development. In that sense the 'cost' of F1 is worth tolerating. There is no such thing as 'carbon neutral,' paying to sell your emissions to someone else is bollocks and everyone knows it.
As long as he doesn't get (Dr) Ferrari on board.
Want to have a bet which has the larger carbon footprint, F1 or a season of second division football including a soggy wednesday evening Plymouth away to Carlisle? It strikes me that a World cycling tour season is not greatly different from F1 with attendant entourage and fan transport. All the millions of TDF fans didn't all get to the roadside by bike. The only different is the vehicle you are watching.
Lets see how regularly eco-biketistas will trot this out as a purile criticism of Alonso's team.
F1 in cycling.....so a German will get ahead into the first corner and that's the race sorted.
Less fuel is used in a formula 1 season than in one transatlantic flight.
And how much fuel is used flying drivers and kit to Australia?
Loads, but fuck it, it's entertaining.
Each car uses less in one season than one jet does in one transatlantic flight? Wow! Where do you get these numbers? That's pretty impressive! Now let's see, one jet is carryig how many passengers in that flight?... Over how many miles? And an F1 car is carrying 1 passenger how many miles in a season? And a bicycle carries 1 rider how many miles in a season? Hmm... Would love to see the math...
I am still astounded how Euskaltel could not agree to Alonso's requests??? I mean yeah I get you like to keep managements contracts in place but now you have cost everyone their job and not just a few because you couldn't agree to accept 2 million euro a year
“We’re not talking about any companies currently involved in cycling. We’re turning to companies who are interested in innovation and with an ecological soul.”
So cycling companies then... also wondering how anything to do with Formula 1 fits with an ecological soul ???
F1 might have a carbon footprint the size of Belgium but technologies like ABS and turbo injection and now KERS do find their way into road cars. Remember your bike was not exactly eco friendly to make.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBFFrsvgu1Y
F1 has been carbon neutral since 1997
Beat me to it.
I'm a massive F1 and cycling fan. The reason cycling is nicer on the continent is because there isn't this bike vs car mindset you get in the UK. I walked past a garage in Italy this summer and they had hanging on the wall a stunning pair of bikes (an old colnago and pinarello) instead of the boob calendar.
F1 may not be the most fuel efficient (though, next year moving to turbos will be a big change on that front), but the engines are remarkably efficient. That efficiency (in a racing car used to get power) also help develop road cars to be more efficient and use less fuel. There's a big argument to be had that F1 is actually very beneficial to everyday life. Would we even be riding carbon bikes without it?? Huge resources go into it, and a huge number of advances are made that wouldn't be made otherwise.
I love cars, but only use mine when I need to. Bike is the way forward for small journeys in town. More people need to see it as everyday transport for it to get over this car vs bike argument that we like to have.
toetruck - You need to check out the current KERS system and next year's engines.
“The intention is to do something new and avoid the problem of doping.”
Alberto Contador, Ivan Basso and Filippo Pozzato have all been tipped as possible members of Team Alonso
