Our squad will set off first in Sunday's 37.2km team time trial.
A fantastic teamwork in a rapid 99.2km long flat race ended with Quick-Step Floors taking second in the Hammer Sprint – another podium at the Hammer Limburg, after the one in the Hammer Climb one day earlier – and surging to the top of the general classification ahead of the final race.
Yves Lampaert was the first Quick-Step Floors rider to make a move, attacking two kilometers from the end of the first lap and landing 100 points which moved our squad in the provisional lead. The next four laps saw the same Yves, together with Alvaro Hodeg and Ecuadorian Champion Jhonatan Narvaez notch up more points which cemented our team's position in the standings, all this while an experienced Philippe Gilbert expertly mastered the front of the peloton, keeping everything together and bringing his teammates to the head of the bunch ahead of each lap finish.
In the last 25 kilometers of the race, Mitchelton-Scott took the control and after placing several riders in the top 10 jumped to the top of the rankings, but our team continued to be a key protagonist, this time thanks to Davide Martinelli, who sprinted twice and added to Quick-Step Floors' tally, as our team kept a firm grip on second place.
"I don't know how obvious it was from the TV, but it was really hard out there. I think the average speed of the race was somewhere around 50km/h, which is crazy considering how many corners we had on the course. We can be proud of our result, because we rode like a Wolfpack, we were always at the front, got infiltrated in almost all the moves and landed many points for the team", Philippe Gilbert said in Sittard, where the event took place.
Quick-Step Floors' composed ride over the first two days of the Hammer Limburtg catapulted our squad at the top of the classification ahead of the Hammer Chase, a 37.2km-long team time trial where we'll start first with a buffer ranging from a few dozens of seconds to minutes over the next outfits in the standings.
Photo credit: ©Luc Claessen/ Getty Images
